I have something against blogs that make it difficult to read them remotely.  I’m a big fan of RSS feeds.  They’re the things that allow busy folks to keep track of the latest and greatest happenings on the Web with much greater ease.  So there are a couple of things that kind of bug me:

• Blogs that don’t have RSS or that have them but put them in difficult-to-locate spots. There are some blogs (like those found on MySpace, for instance) – not a lot of them – that simply don’t publish RSS feeds.  I make it a habit to avoid these like the plague, no matter how quality the content is on these blogs.  It’s just a bit too difficult and time-consuming to visit these on a regular basis to see if there are updates.  There are others, though, that publish RSS feeds but place them in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to subscribe to them.  Windows Live, for example, puts the feeds for their blogs in a place where browsers like Firefox can’t even auto-detect them.  I guess that it shouldn’t be any real surprise that Microsoft makes you jump through unnecessary hoops in order to use their particular brand of blog service.
• People that use the <!--more--> tag on almost every entry. There are some people who propose that publishing the full content of your blog entries to your feed will reduce the amount of traffic to your blog.  They suggest that the best way to get people to come to your blog is to give them a taste and then finish luring them in with the promise of more.  I’m not one of those people.  In my opinion, excerpting every single entry to your feed is only a little better than having no feed at all because it still forces readers to click through in order to finish reading.  I usually avoid blogs that only put excerpts in their feeds (there is one notable exception on my blogroll) for this very reason.  I use the <!--more--> tag sparingly, usually just to hide spoiler information from those that don’t want to see it.  Maybe using excerpts really does work well for most people.  Personally, I prefer to post full content and write what I hope are quality entries that will encourage people to come to my site to comment.

  Of course, these are just my personal opinions on these two items.  As the saying goes, your own mileage on these may vary a bit on these, and I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences in these areas.  That is, after all, what comments are all about.