Reader changed?
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I still don’t understand how to use the reader efficiently and how it makes things easier.
It doesn’t and clearly what you describe appears to be intentional. It appears to be aimed at compelling us blogger to display full posts in the Reader, and if we don’t do that by changing our RSS Feed settings to “Full text” rather than “Summary” then those using the WordPress.com Reader hare punished with having to click twice.
More important is this fact. I have not provided full posts in my RSS Feed because when I first started blogging 8 years ago that’s how the RSS feed sucking blog scrapers stole my content within seconds of publishing it. Then I had to devote my time and energy into completing and filing DMCA take down notices to get it removed from their splogs.
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It appears to be aimed at compelling us blogger to display full posts in the Reader,
I thought it was aimed at us changing our setting to summary so that someone who views our blog post counts as a view, but seriously, who knows what they were thinking!
I just did another test with my friend’s account. If I have my settings set to ‘full text’ then she can click on my blog post in her reader, read the entire blog and like my post and it still doesn’t count as a read.
if we don’t do that by changing our RSS Feed settings to “Full text” rather than “Summary” then those using the WordPress.com Reader hare punished with having to click twice.
I’ll be leaving my settings at ‘summary’ from now on so anyone who reads my post counts a a view. I feel bad about forcing my readers to make more clicks (or not read at all) but if someone reads my post then I should get a view from it.
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I use the summery also – mainly for the anti scrapper reasons @TT mentioned above – stuff is still stolen but they now need to work harder.
Other reasons for the summery – once in a while I have a lot of pictures and that keeps from jamming up the email inbox – makes is cleaner – if I can’t convince a person to click on the read more with my lead then maybe they are not interested or maybe I wrote a bad title and lead
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I just did another test with my friend’s account. If I have my settings set to ‘full text’ then she can click on my blog post in her reader, read the entire blog and like my post and it still doesn’t count as a read.
Thanks for sharing your test results.
What I fail to get is why the post title is not a permalink to the post itself ie. why has the permalink been removed?
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Timethief. No doubt you have an insight into the wordpress thinking in terms of mobility. I too do not wish to be hypercritical or shout loudly.
Not everyone who has a phone or tablet is prepared quite yet to dump either their desktop or their blog. I have no idea where your statistics are coming from but they do not apply to my family or friends but we all have toothbrushes :). Phones yes, smartphones not so much.
You are saying that we will lose control over the formatting or lose any advantage to having designed our blogs to highlight our efforts. e.g. a homogenized blog that looks like the same as every other wordpress blog.
And many may not wish to be pushed into a new format that requires more effort for their readers to get to their blog.
If wordpress is making such a significant change they should communicate it clearly and not surprise their users.
Many of us bought customization and/or fiddled with the basics to get what we wanted to highlight our work, overnight that is now meaningless.
Smugmug went through a massive transformation requiring all users to make massive changes to their websites. Users have been given time to make the changes (months if not a year), many videos and webinars to explain the changes and most importantly a very responsive help network that was open to making changes adding things and changing things. WordPress is simply making massive changes and not explaining them or their impact.
I suspect I am like many users, my blog serves a purpose unique to me, that is much enhanced by the easy ability WordPress gave us to share. I have made many friends through this, but now my ability to communicate and share has changed for reasons unexplained.
I hope this thinking is helpful and not problematic.
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I’d be fine with the changes to the Reader if it was an option alongside the old. On my tablet, I do prefer to use the WordPress app, which presents me with a mobile-friendly version of the blogs I am reading. But I also want to be able to enjoy the personal nature of a blog on my desktop.
I also don’t see the business sense in this–if I had a customization upgrade, this change to the Reader would make me cancel it since it doesn’t make much of a difference anyway. My site isn’t an internationally known news site that gets visited outside of the WordPress community by millions of people a day. People find my blog by looking at topics in the Reader, a Reader that now doesn’t take them to the site.
Thankfully, I long ago set my blog to only display summaries/snippets in feeds, anyone who wants to read it has to go to the blog anyway.
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One point I just want to make, is that I like being taken to the original blog to read posts – I don’t really appreciate the generic window. I feel like it robs me of the beautiful individuality that comes with each blog. I realise we can double click to get to blogs now…but can’t you just make it possible to get to blogs in one click instead? :-)
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Omg! I am so sick of reading how so many people hate this new Reader and the “Staff” or “Happiness Engineers” don’t seem to care. It’s no wonder the people at WP have hardly made any responses to this. It was a dumb idea. They did this with no warning and now it’s difficult to go directly to someone’s blog. At this rate, I’ll never look at many blogs ever again. It’s too much work. I still don’t know how to get to someone’s blog from the Reader or back to where my last point was. Why should we make our blogs look pretty if no one will see them?! I ALWAYS click on the post title link so I can go directly to a person’s blog. I don’t want to go directly to some dumb pop up window. This concerns me as to what other not-so-smart ideas the WP staff will come up with in the future to make life difficult for us all. It’s amazing how the staff are on so many other threads on a more frequent basis than they are on this one. Amazing. Someone please let me know when the Reader goes back to normal!! Thank you!
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Occasionally, when I’m logged into WordPress, I see a message asking me to give feedback, like a yes/no question of the form, “Would you post more if you had more followers?”
Why haven’t I seen a message asking what I think about the new Reader? It would make sense, wouldn’t it, to do a wide-scale poll of WordPress users to see what they think of the new Reader changes. This way, WordPress wouldn’t have to “guess” what percentage of people like the changes versus those who dislike them. (If WordPress has already done this on a large scale, thank you very much.)
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Thanks WordPress you have successfully left me with no choice but to read my favourite blogs in another reader. Hey, you did it to yourself with going all mobile for those on the move. Heck, I don’t even own a cellphone and you’ve now you’ve annoyed me with your new reader. It’s a joke. I was wondering why my stats had gone way down … no one wants to click twice to read a post. Oh get over yourself and go back to what it was before.
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Oh, and I would like to add that in the last 3 weeks I went and bought customization for my blog. A pretty package that cost me $99, I then spent a whole whack of time fine tuning my blog to make it look all smart and pretty so my visitors would have a pleasant experience. Oh, let me tell you WordPress you have my money, then you stole my power and my readers. This just gives me one other reason to walk out your door and self-host.
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I guess the reader would make sense if I was on my phone!!!. But I prefer to read on my computer. On the computer the new reader doesn’t make any sense.
I will go back to reading my subscriptions from my email inbox and miss out on any suggested blogs…
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Thank you for information.
The best way to improve the reader is that with one klick I’m able again to open the post directly in his permalink adress. With one click – maybe with an extra link or best with the time or the title or the picture …
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The comment by Timethief that it makes life easier for people on mobiles is nonsense. Since the update the reader DOESN’T WORK AT ALL on my mobile.
My phone is a Nokia 925 with windows phone 8 with all latest updates installed so is hardly some old naff model either. My phone previously displayed the reader perfectly and was easy to use, as easy to use as on a PC. I have been using the WordPress App for a month now on this new phone and until the updates it worked fine. There were some minor bugs but it was perfectly usable and enjoyable.
Since the changes the stupid large font takes up half the screen, causes format errors even on my relatively large mobile screen and the popup page that you get when clicking that silly large font opens up WITH NO LINK to view the original post and WITH NO LINK to get to the persons blog. The popup also doesn’t handle scrolling on very large posts as it stops half way down so I am unable to read a full post.
My wife also has a smartphone and she too has found the exact same problem – the reader is now unusable on our mobiles.
So please tell me again how this is improving our mobile experience???
Even if the popup worked it would still be an inferior solution to the original direct path through to the original blog post which our mobiles could handle with ease. Maybe the developers at WordPress need to buy themselves some decent spartphones if they were unable to utilise the reader as it was rather than inflict this garbage on people with proper smartphones that can handle a full and properly formatted post.
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I don’t know how WordPress developers use the reader but for me I read lots of posts from people that may not have the same primary interest or hobby as me but they happen to post something that appears in say my Land Rover topic search. Previously I’d click into the post, read it and already be on the users blog so could immediately start reading other posts and pages. Over the last few years I have found some lovely blogs and met some great people that I would not have previously found. This has significantly expanded my view of the world and the subjects that interest me and I’ve learnt alot. I therefore value the reader extremely highly hence the reason I’m personally so furious with these changes.
It seems to me that the changes are designed for people who put up a short post and don’t bother putting any effort into their blogging whereas most of the people I talk to put alot of effort into their posts, take time to lay them and their blogs out well, as I try to do. We do not want these changes as they don’t work for us.
My suggestion for a fix is for WordPress to stop forcing changes on everybody and instead make any changes parameterised within our dashboards so we can decide which changes best suit our way of blogging. We are all different and we all like to use things in different ways. By forcing people to change to a ‘one size fits all’ approach simply causes upset whereas allowing people to tailor the changes to suit themselves promotes more loyalty to WP and promotes freedom of expression which is surely the whole point of having a blog in the first place?
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My browsers are configured to open each link in a new tab. So I checked out that the “new functionality” – what a great joke! – more than doubles both the downloaded data to view an (one! only one!) article and the time untill it is visible on my screen. To say that this is “new functionality” seems to be more than sarcastic …
(Using the reader in a LINUX with Lynx is now impossible.)
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I fail to see how only displaying one tag makes my blog easier to find and easier to read. But then I’m one of those old fashioned people who sit at an expensive 24″ monitor fiddling with photoshop instead of just instagramming the lot.
I have stuff in my menu on the blog to make more content available to interested readers as well as links in my text to older, similar posts. Nobody will see that either.
I’ve even noticed that WP has made an attempt to do “related items” at the bottom of the posts – but they don’t show in the new reader, so that was a piece of useless programming too? ;-)
ANYWAY I HAVE A QUESTION too: Surely there is a snippet of code that can detect if the reader is on mobile or PC? I mean, those existed back in the days of the very first browsers, because I remember setting up those things in Notepad, my first html editor.
In other words, it must be quite possible to direct mobile users to a specific reader and the rest of us to the old friendly 1-click reader. In fact, I think that’s what they do with Blogspot (not that I want to go there, but hey…)
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colourcottage, even when using my mobile I don’t want to be directed to a ‘mobile version’ of the reader. I just want the old reader back which worked great on my mobile.
I’ve had to disable the ‘mobile friendly’ setting on my blog because after speaking directly to my most regular visitors it seems WP’s ‘mobile friendly’ features make the blog mobile unfriendly. The blog now works correctly on a mobile and visitors from search engines can see all my categories on the right hand side properly which is key for me as like you I have spent ages setting up detailed categories to allow people to find technical articles quickly. The ‘mobile friendly’ setting on the blog was rendering the categories at the bottom of the page below the post and all its comments so was unusable to my followers as in some cases I have a hundred comments on my most popular technical articles.
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@mud4fun Well, I don’t even have a smartphone, but if what you say is true, apparently neither do the programmers at WP, since they haven’t tested and found what you just mentioned.
I have a few times looked at my blog on a tablet and that seemed to behave much as on my PC, so I don’t get these changes at all.
I’m betting it would be just as easy to make either version an OPTION in the user settings. Then everybody could be happy.
Pretty please?
I follow more than 200 blogs. I’m feeling really tired in advance over having to print out the list and enter each of them manually on Bloglovin or something like that.
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