Blog Excerpts
I have traditionally avoided using the concept of a blog excerpt on Primordial Ooze. The main reason for this was because I frequently added what I thought were cool graphics and imagery to my posts and I wanted to see all of this by simply hitting my home page and scrolling down.
The fact is, though, this is not a very effective reason to keep full-posts on my homepage.
Using excerpts has a few advantages for me. First, it helps me think about my post and distill the essence of it right in the beginning, much like a newspaper article would do. In the long run, I think this will yield a more sensible structure to my posts.
Second, I believe that I’ll be better able to analyze what posts are the most popular. While I like to think that my blog is my blog and I’ll post whatever I feel like it, I also get a thrill when certain topics get a lot of reads. To that end, if I knew more precisely which articles were the most popular, I would certainly try and explore those topics more.
Currently, Google Analytics says that my homepage is the most popular page:
It also shows that some of my archive pages are very popular as well. Even with excerpts, the root /blog page may still be t he most popular since people visit the root before venturing elsewhere. However, Google Analytics detect this kind of digging. If the entire content is on the homepage, however, there will simply be no digging.
Contrary to this logic, I have recently updated my RSS feed with full content. I noticed that my RSS feed had all of the text of my posts, but none of the formatting or embedded graphics. I fixed that and will start thinking about whether the feed will have full graphics and content or just the excerpts.