Fashion Industry discussion, review, analysis, news, and information

Yesterday someone left a comment saying that they were unsubscribing from this blog because of partial feeds.  Incidentally, I was going to do a post that explains what RSS is and the different ways you could subscribe to this blog. That comment was a good reminder to explain why partial feeds are used in feed readers. 

But before I do that, let's start off with what exactly RSS is for those of you who have big question marks in your head.  I could go geek talk on you, but instead I'll share with you this fabulous explanation of RSS over at Back in Skinny Jeans: How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way.  (Make sure to click back here so I can tell you how to stay updated with The Runway Scoop via RSS!)

Ok, so basically there are two ways you can subscribe to this blog:

1.  Via a feed reader.  Here is the link you would enter into your feed reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRunwayScoop.  There's also the orange button you can press which is in the second column to the right (orange is standard, but I've seen other colors)...

2.  Via email.  You can receive updates of The Runway Scoop to your email box simply by entering your email address in the little box right below the orange button in the column to the right.  These updates are delivered by Feedblitz.

So now that we've got the basics down, let me explain why we use partial feeds instead of full feeds here.  As a blog publisher, you have the choice to use full or partial feeds.  Full vs partial feeds has been an ongoing debate in the blogging world.  One of the main reasons we use partial feeds is because we've found that people have scraped the content from this blog and have used it in non-ethical ways like reposting content elsewhere without giving any credit.  So partial feeds are used so that these "scrapers" have only access to just a headline or only a couple sentences of my article. 

To be quite honest, I'm a little baffled as to why full vs partial feeds is such a huge debate. I get both sides of the story and I do take into account what my readers want, however, I'm just trying to understand why it's so hard to click through to a site to read the full article?  Ok, yes, maybe people don't like to visit the actual blog because of annoying ads and I can understand that because I feel the same way, but if an article is compelling enough I don't even pay attention to what else is happening on the blog.  And that's coming from someone who already has attention span issues ;) 

So now you know. 

I understand that I'm not going to be able to please everybody on this issue.  I do welcome your feedback, however.  If the majority of you do prefer full feeds I can look into changing back.  Send me an email:  maria [at] therunwayscoop.com or leave a comment below...

Thank you for reading and subscribing!