Cool! Look out for me, I'm usually standing on the corner of Lockhart Road, under the bridge.

I don't mind clickin ya off of the newsfeed. I did have a problem with getting here though. The url reported through your RSS is wrong for the post so I ended up 404. Fix that and I'll be happy as a pig in poop.

I've spent the last two days fighting off a particularly persistent specimen of a particularly perverse niche of the adult entertainment industry.

In the process of taking countermeasures, I've tried no less than three plugins in six hours to no avail.

Finally I have one that reduces those spam comments to a trickle, which I have to dispose off using bayonets.

And I'm doing all this stuff instead of standing under the bridge !

Not quite sure how my comment above got attributed to Simon. Wierd.

Well, I'm afraid that for me RSS readers offer a lot more than just the ability to read blogs. I use a service called bloglines, which allow s me to not only quickly read blogs (and I monitor 200 of them) but also to classify interesting posts, put the best ones on my clip blog, save other posts for later, etc. That's real value added for me, and if you are only going to publish 100 word summaries, I'm afraid that the inconvenience factor (especially since your blog pages are sometimes unavailable and not infrequently slow) I'm going to unsubscribe. I do it with some disappointment (because I do enjoy reading your blog).

I must furthe admit being a little surprised by your decision. It is easy to track RSS readers (for example, just include a fetched image in each entry and count the number of times it is requested) and you don't currently have advertising. Should you choose to add it in the future, you could face the decision then of whether to support RSS readers or not.

Thanks so much for your blog up until now, and I wish you all the best in the future.

Anonymous user:

Thanks for that. I have to say I actually forgot that those trapped behind the great Firewall often use readers to access blogs. On tracking RSS readers, the image idea will only slow page loads even more, so I'm not sure that's a solution.

I've reset the excerpts to show full posts again. My point remains that it is difficult for bloggers to track their full readership if many are using RSS readers...and readership is the lifeblood of a blog.

Thanks again for your comments.

Simon,

One comment about your RSS feed: The feed reader I use (Feed on feeds) can't parse your feed. I don't have any problem with other feeds - but yours seems to cause it problems.

The feed validator also complains:
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsimonworld.mu.nu%2Findex.rdf

I've had that problem before. It seems to occur because certain Trackback URLs don't agree with the parsers; so when I do an Asia by Blog, for example, it tends to happen. In this case it's stuck on a trackback to Dai Tou Laam. The only solution is to delete links to those posts, but I don't want to do that. I'm not sure what other solutions exist.