An Announcement for our RSS Feed Subscribers

It is hard to believe that it has been six years since Caffeinated Thoughts was launched.  Now entering our seventh year as the founder and editor I believe we need to make a change in how we offer our RSS feed.  A few months ago we made a change to allow readers to just subscribe to topics or specific authors and that won’t change.  I believe that is a better way to serve you so you can select and only subscribe to the content that you want to read whether it is a little or our catch all RSS feed.

I appreciate those of you who are daily subscribers whether you read us in your Google Reader, Bloglines, some other RSS feed reader or get our stuff in your email.  Since our inception we’ve offered our full content in our RSS feed so you wouldn’t have to click over to the site.  I believe that was a good way to serve you, and in some ways I still do, but I believe we are at a point we need to start offering excerpts in our RSS feed instead of our full content.  So starting next week we will only offer excerpts in our RSS feeds and you’ll have to click through to read the entire post.

I realize that some of you may be frustrated by that so I wanted to take the time to explain why I’m making the change.

1. We’ve always offered our content for free – that will never change.  However we do have advertising on our site.  I believe it is a way to honor and show respect to those who invest in advertising to try to put “more eyeballs” on their ads.  Not that you have to click through to their site, but by offering full content in our feeds we’re keeping quite a few people from the site who could see the ads (and possibly respond to them).  A few of you do click over, a lot of you do not.

2.  We want to encourage you to engage with us on the site.  You can’t comment on one of our posts from the RSS feed.  We’d like to hear from you.

3.  We’d like to know what stories and articles you’re interested in.  There’s no way to tell what you are reading and what links you’re clicking through on when you are just reading our feed content.

4.  We’ve launched a featured videos section, but the way they are set up you can’t view them from the feed – you’d have to click over anyway.

5.  Those who we link to will know if we’re sending traffic their way.  They can’t we are the ones sending them traffic if you click through a link from an RSS feed.  Bloggers tend to reciprocate links – I know I do.

Anyway, I know this will be a change, and I hope it isn’t a major inconvenience.  We appreciate your subscription and the fact that we are a daily (or almost daily) read for you, it is humbling and we count it an honor.

On behalf of the contributors here at Caffeinated Thoughts thank you so much for sticking with us as we’ve grown through the years.

God bless,

Shane

P.S.  If you read us via Facebook, Twitter or just come to our site directly this change will not impact you in the slightest.