Have It Your Way 

RSS Bandit has released it's latest version. For those not familiar with it, RSS Bandit is a free news aggregator using the .NET framework... meaning you can use it to subscribe to XML news feeds that many blogs make available. I personally do the majority of my blog reading using this program. It makes my blog reading very efficient. I don't have to constantly check a blog to see if it's been updated, RSS Bandit does that for me. So reading blogs becomes as easy, and fast, as reading email.

As a blog owner, things become a little more difficult. Most blog engines (like Blogger) allow you to control what goes into your news feed. Meaning you can either include the entire post, or just a summary (usually the first x number of words) with a link to the full post. My personal preference as a blog reader is to have the entire post (which is why I do it that way in my blog feed). However, when you do this, you don't know how many people are reading your site (it doesn't track on Sitemeter). If you have blog ads (which I don't right now), it becomes even more of a problem... because people who read your entire post from the feed won't be exposed to your ads.

In fact, I recently donated to Instapundit because I only read his site using RSS Bandit... and he is gracious enough to have his full posts in the news feed. But his site is also expensive for him to run, so I thought I'd toss some money his way to make up for the ad revenue I don't generate for him.

I've been thinking recently of changing my feed to only show the summary... seeing if that generates an uptick in my Sitemeter stats. Any thoughts from people? Do any of you read my blog using a news aggregator? If you do use one, does only having the summaries in the feed bug you? Discuss.