best part of blog surfer missing in subscriptions feature
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I see that the new subscriptions feature has begun to replace my blog surfer, but I am unhappy with having to go to the subscribed blog just to see more than the first line of text. Can we get at least a ten-line preview in the subscription feature?
I love being able to aggregate a host of subscribed writers, but they are not exactly writing pearls of wisdom in all cases, and a chance for preview would be a huge help.
Also, does the fact that I am subscribed to a blog show up in that writer’s stats page? It should.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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A couple of things: In the past, when you read a blog in the Blog Surfer, there was no “hit” generated on the subscribed blog nor was the blog owner aware that you were subscribed or reading their blog.
In the new Subscriptions reader, if you have your subscription preferences set to only read on site (i.e. only in the Reader) making you read the blog entry on the blog itself causes a hit on the blog, but you *won’t* show up in the blog’s subscribers stats.
However, if you have your subscription preferences set to receive an email from the blog (i.e. instantly, daily or weekly), you do show up in the blog’s subscribers stats, but I am not certain that the resulting email creates a “hit/view” for the blog. I’m guessing it doesn’t.
I agree with you that whether read via Reader or via email, all subscriptions should show up in subscriber stats.
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Thanks Jennifer, I was aware of the lack of stats from Blog Surfer and had hoped that was to be one of the positive changes in the move to Subscriptions. I don’t know much about feeds yet, but I thought there were ways to know how many readers were taking a feed.
What I liked about the Surfer was that I had a no-click view of a selected writer’s post and, if it evoked a response from me, I would make contact and leave a comment. But now I have a dozen one-liners per day which tell me nothing and not enough time to view them all to see if they are worth my while.
If there is no such increase in our knowledge of our own ‘subscribed’ readership, I would say the change is a negative, since our power to review a custom aggregation of writers is now gone – except by email.
It looks like we are being ‘herded’ into making the email setting if we want to see what’s in a post without. I suppose that’s harmless enough to try, although I worry about letting all that bandwidth into my email reader.
I could limit my subscriptions to only those blogs which I am sure have interesting content – not nearly as many as I was willing to carry in my old blog surfer. But that represents a shrinkage of the network rather than an expansion.
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Just like detheologized, I know there are many that would like to see a fuller view of the posts in the Subscription reader. The list option would not have to be eliminated, there could just be a toggle to allow the user to decide to use list view or full view (like Google Reader has).
With the loss of the full view that Blog Surfer gave many of my fellow users are choosing to use Google Reader instead of relying on the WP Subscription reader.
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I’ve had trouble finding a way to articulate what I dislike about the new Subscription reader. Detheologized did it.
The Surfer was not only fast, and not only provided a fuller view of the posts, I also could see in an instant whether comments had been added.
I don’t have the time or patience to sort through a mailbox full of posts and comments. Clicking back and forth from the Subscription reader is slow, I have to change to Firefox to use it at all because it won’t work in IE7, and my hopes of adapting the simple list in “manage subscriptions” is – well, hopeless.
I guess I’ll have to explore Google reader or expand the personal system I devised for blogger postings.
Thumbs down for this change.
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I have set all my posts to provide only excerpts by choosing “summary” on my Settings > Reading page. . I have done this deliberately because RSS feed sucking blog scrapers were stealing my content and it was taking me a great deal of time to track them down, send in DMCA complaints to their web hosts, and get my content removed from their splogs.
I assume that any other wordpress.com member using the new Subscription feature to subscribe to my posts is only getting “summary” excerpts but I’m not sure about that. Can anyone confirm whether or not this is the case?
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@tt if you have set your feed to summary and someone has subscribed to your blog with an email delivery (instant, daily, weekly) only an excerpt is sent by mail.
Generally, it looks to me like WordPress.com has been tweaking the on site Subscription reader. Now all subscribed blogs there only have the first line of a new post regardless of whether an author’s feed setting is summary or full post.
If this is the case, the on site Subscription reader will certainly prove less useful than the Blog Surfer in the long run.
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I can understand how individual bloggers would not want the full content of their posts to be viewed in a reader for reasons like timethief mentioned and I would be happy with just getting summaries, so long as they were more than oneliners like the Subscription page currently provides.
Also I did notice that the Subscription page seems to bog my system down more than if I just use Google Reader, even in FF, like shoreacres mentioned. So for now I still just use Google Reader.
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@justjennifer
Thanks for the confirmation. I noticed that the only the first line is being displayed now in the wordpress.com reader and I’m okay with that.Over the years we have made it so convenient for people to get gull copies of posts. Well, to what end?
We don’t get a pageview if a subscriber can read the whole post.
We don’t get as many comments.
We don’t get as many backlinks.
The whole pattern of how we bloggers link has changed and IMHO it’s not for the better. A “like” or a “tweet” which contain no Google juice to our posts are replacing backlinks. oy vey!
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