You might want to skip over this.
If you have a reader community – then the key is the to make the reader easy to use without a great deal of involvement on my part.
But wordpress has created all of these layers. I scroll down the reader, I read the first 3 sentences and then I have to click. Then in more than 50% of the cases, I’m going to have click AGAIN to go to their website to read the rest of the post. And then… if the post was a reblog, I may have to click AGAIN to get the original post to get to finish the damn post.
I’ll be honest, you have to be PRETTY compelling to get me to click over to your website. If you have not already established yourself in my mind as someone who interests me, I’m NOT going to click to your site.
What BAFFLES ME is why require the click to the site?
What also baffles me is why I can’t set my blog to show my entire post on the front page of the reader. Its obviously possible because randomly you see it happen, its even happened to me but I don’t know why. Is it just WordPress being random?
And also, why can’t I find my own posts sometimes on the reader? I post, I get a star or comment and yet – I don’t see it on the reader? Why the hell not?
Does that mean I’m not seeing all the posts of the people I follow? Because if so, that really pisses me off. I want to decide for myself who to read and not read. I don’t want the Reader deciding.
It's a Thought 
Hmmmm…I can only speak to my experiences. If I click “visit” (bottom left) on the reader blurb it takes me to the post. If I click on the title of the blog it takes me somewhere else which requires extra clicks. As for how much it shows, I think that’s determined by the format you chose. Gallery is the short clip. I think Standard may give the full post. You are right though that the reader has been wonky lately. I miss the word count it used to give. It would let me know the length especially if I was pressed for time. Also the bell you click on to see the likes and messages — I often can’t respond there or it freezes up or sometimes I get the message that the action (response) failed which requires me to return to the blog post to leave my comment. They’ve made some changes that have boogered up some things. Unfortunately they were things I liked. There I ranted with you!
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Personally, I have given up trying to understand the inner workings of WordPress. Almost every day I see statistics to the effect of “3 people liked this post and 0 people viewed it.” I think that when people read on the reader without clicking it doesn’t register. If they click on the reader post to read, it registers in your statistics under “Reader” but not “Views”. If they click again, it finally gets into your own statistics as a view. But that is just a hypothesis. I briefly considered devising an experiment to test all this, but then decided “Aw . . . what’s the point?” You figure out after a while who is really a person and really reading (or “following” – I hate that term!). In my case it is NOT the Australian Pet Food Company, or the Center for the Teachings of Christ, or the Ultimate Cleaning Supplies company. It’s people like you. (And it is mutual!)
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EXACTLY. I’m just here for the people and I want them to be able to easily read my rant, just like I want to easily read about their lives or thoughts or whatever.
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Blame the World Wide Web, Mobile Computing, and HTML / HTML5, Java, CSS and a host of other forms and functions.
When choosing a format, for your blog make sure you understand the substructures, and whether you have made a choice on a mobile friendly page, ad pictures, based page, or one that is more print and content friendly. You are getting a lot of choice for free, and in some cases it behaves strange, but understanding the makeup, and the format you select make a lot of difference in how the navigation goes when visiting the blog… 🙂
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Yeah. But my issue is with the READER, not the blog site. Surely how my blog site is set up won’t effect how the reader works? Or does it?
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It might, I notice lately that some formats appear in the reader without issue, others now require that you visit the page … Have you inquired with the WordPress team ?
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No. I guess I really should. Its becoming a more annoying thing for me.
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Do you follow your own blog? My posts stopped showing up on my reader when I stopped following my own blog (seemed a little silly to be a follower of me?). Now I have my reader set to email me every new post. That way I don’t have to rely on the reader for posts and I can manage them better. And, most of the time, the entire post shows up in the email so unless I want to like or comment (which you can click in the email) I don’t have to click any more buttons.
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THANK YOU! Now I can at least see myself in the Reader.
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Wow…I love your blog…enjoyed reading your comments about various subjects…your Mom (I had a mom like that) and I agree about the REader…it is so mysterious I rarely go there…and I am annoyed by the “likes” that come automatically before my thing is even POSTED… how can anyone like it if they haven’t read it yet? geez… so now I am following…I hate that too, I am a very literal person and I don’t “follow” people around. 🙂
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I gave up on the reader and now follow everyone via email. Takes a while (which is why I am a week behind on my reading) but at least I dictate what I read not the reader
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