I’ve been debating (largely with myself) for quite a while whether to place full posts on the front page, or whether to abbreviate the posts with the ‘More’ tag. Most of the time, I’ve chosen to go with the abbreviated posts.

Why? Well, my logic kind of goes like this. If you have a bunch of full posts on the front page, it’s going to be very, very long to scroll down, even if there are only five or six posts on a page. The advantage, however, would be that you don’t have to actually click on an item to see the full post.

So I thought I’d ask you. Would you rather see the full post on the front page? Or would you rather have it abbreviated with ‘More’ and then click on it? Or, perhaps, you read through an RSS reader and don’t really care what’s on the front page. It would be great to get some feedback, whatever it is.

Part of the reason for me asking this question is that I’m trying to reconcile how site statistics reflect the opinions of the site’s users (or, how they don’t).

If I just look at the stats, it would seem that people coming to this site are generally divided into two nearly-equal groups: those who find the site through a search, and regular RSS readers. Logic would then dictate that it wouldn’t really matter whether posts on the front page were abbreviated or not, since very few users actually access the site through the front page.

Yet I think statistics can sometimes be misleading, and still believe that site users usually have a preference, even if it’s not reflected in the stats. I’d be very interested to hear some opinions.

And yes, I’m using a ‘More’ tag for this post.