Some people prefer one thing, some another. I have a “magazine” page, I have a “full post” page, I have an “excerpts” page. I give my readers choices.

And if anyone (even one reader) asked me to do something else, I’d do that too.. why not??

It’s that “make me exit a page” that sends quivers down webmasters spines.. you’ll leave if I have excerpts, the other guy gets equally ticked off if he can’t have them..

That’s why I do it all: my main page is “magazine” style with an excerpt from the most recent post at the top, but you’ll also see links that that you could bookmark for excerpts (all recent posts presented as excerpts) and “blog format” which is more like the traditional blog: each post fully presented, newest first.

My intent, of course, is to try to make everyone happy. My fear is that the hasty visitor who hates excerpts will never notice the link that will give them what they want.. but of course if I made the default full posts, there’s probably even less chance of noticing those posts.

What’s a poor webmaster to do?

But, my friends, not all blogs are created equal. There are many communities within the blogosphere as it has come to be known and they function in vastly different ways. For instance, excerpts are not so popular in my area of the web (personal, amateur blogs) except in the cases of extremely long blogs and doing an excerpt or magazine styled blog would simply be ridiculous.

In our corner, it’s not simply about hits but about people actually reading blogs and each and every entry. Full posts forces a skim through if not a full read through in the way that department stores put more desirable stock in the back so that you walk through everything else on your way.

Personally, I hate the excerpts. There’s nothing like my reading being interrupted by a “read more” link to make me exit a page. Whatever happened to bringing the content to your visitors as quickly and efficiently as possible? Isn’t forcing a visitor to click to see the rest of (or even the entire post) a bit like using thumbnails which don’t give a decent preview which results in the visitor having to download the whole wallpaper anyway?

But, it doesn’t seem like my logic applies to your corner of the blogosphere. Maybe blogs can’t even be labeled under a single umbrella term anymore.