bloggers: heads up!
I’ve posted here before about Bloglines, the RSS feed aggregator. (What are RSS feeds??) There’s no way I could stay on top of things without it. I read news and blogs through feeds every day, as do more and more readers out there.
I’d like to pass on two tips to bloggers to make reading their blogs through aggregators easier for people like myself:
1. Those of you with a Blogspot blog: There’s a way to “turn on” the RSS feed for your blog. Go here to follow the very easy instructions. Don’t forget to post the feed’s link on your blog! (Or post it in the comments once you’re done.)
2. Those of you with a Movable Type blog: You already automatically have an RSS feed. However, the default way each your posts shows up in a feed is as the first few lines only. We feed readers then have to click to visit your blog to read the rest of the entry. This is a pain; unless I’m really engrossed in what I’ve read so far, I will skip it and forgo reading the rest of your entry.
So, what you can do to remedy this is to fix your code so it posts the whole entry in your feed, rather than just the opening excerpt. In Movable Type, go to Templates —> “RSS 1.0 Index” and the URL is “index.rdf”. Go to the part in the code that says:
<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml=”1″$></description>
And simply change it to:
<description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml=”1″$></description>
Thanks everyone!
The One True b!X said,
January 31, 2004 @ 3:06 pm
Of course, posting full feeds also allows various websites aroudn the Web to steal your full-text content, sometimes on commercial sites, in essence letting them make money off of your work.
Also, the Web is a gift economy, but a proper gift economy actually requires an EXCHANGE of gifts. IMHO, the proper exchange in this case is: I let readers see excerpts so they know whether or not something is going to interest them. If so, the exchange is that they “spend” their time and attention actually clicking through to me.
(Your mileage may vary, all opinions are subjective, this is not a holy war, etc.)
Emily said,
January 31, 2004 @ 3:15 pm
One True: What does it matter if a reader clicks through to your full site, though, if they’re “spending their time and attention” reading your content? I don’t understand how the blogger is losing anything by having his or her feed be full entries. Isn’t the point to have others reading your content?
As far as stealing content… I haven’t seen any evidence of web sites grabbing entire feeds from blogs/news sites and posting them without credit. Have you seen this? Until I see that this is, in fact, a major issue, I am not deterred from changing my feed to entire rather than excerpted entries.
The One True b!X said,
January 31, 2004 @ 3:29 pm
What I’ve seen, and I’ll have to do some digging to find the reference, is a site that (1) steals full-text content for their own uses, and (2) if the RSS feed doesn’t provide full-text for their commercial convenience, they scrape the HTML of the site itself and publish full text on their own. And that was just one site that got caught doing so.
As I said, however, this isn’t a holy war, and opinion is subjective, and sites and their authors differ.
In my case, which is an (currently offline thanks to Qwest) ongoing experiment in hobbyist reporting/journalism, readership in a component of credibility. If I’m not getting readers to my site, the readership figures would be inaccurate. Numbers, in this case, matter.
Aside from that subjective issue, I’ll try to figure out where this content-lifting site was.
The One True b!X said,
January 31, 2004 @ 3:34 pm
Here it is:
http://www.blogrunner.com/
Emily said,
January 31, 2004 @ 3:39 pm
I don’t get what you’re implying …that site is crediting back with links to the full entry and a title citing the source. Blogrunner looks to me like Daypop or Blogdex - a blog threads aggregator. How are they stealing?
The One True b!X said,
January 31, 2004 @ 3:52 pm
Dig deeper. They reprint the full-text of entries as scraped from the HTML of the various websites themselves.
For example, here’s the opening page of your site on Blogrunner:
http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/B/7/6/00221067.html
And then if you scroll down and click “More Entries” you get this page:
http://www.blogrunner.com/channel?c_id=221067
From there, any browse link takes you to the full-text as scraped from the HTML of your website.
BR intends, at some point, to accept ads, which in essence means they will make $$ off of presenting other people’s material with or without their permission to do so.
Whether any particular author finds this to be an issue or not is, of course, variable.
Emily said,
January 31, 2004 @ 4:01 pm
I see what you’re saying and that it might bother some people. It doesn’t really faze me because they’re not claiming to have written my content… I thought at first that’s what you were implying.
Elle said,
February 1, 2004 @ 6:14 pm
About the logistics of the issue - pardon my ignorance, but I don’t understand how to set up a link for my RSS feed. I’m using BloggerPro for my blog, and I have the RSS option selected. My referrer logs indicate that two, maybe three, people are coming to my site via Bloglines. But I don’t have a link set-up for an RSS or XML feed or whatever, and not sure how/why to do so, if Bloglines readers can already get what they need.
Feel free to take this email, Emily, if you want to help me. Or post here if you think others of your readers are this ignorant!
:)
Ampersand said,
February 1, 2004 @ 9:29 pm
Well, I’ve made the suggested changes - I’d rather have as many readers as possible, even if some of them are uncounted. I wish there was some way to know how many folks read my blog via RSS, though.
ben said,
February 2, 2004 @ 5:39 pm
…And Ampersand makes just the point that makes my RSS feed brief.
Originally, I set up the feed to conserve bandwidth; when I’m making lots of posts the RSS feed is a lot less bandwidth intensive.
…But also, if someone grabs my full feed from Bloglines I have no clue at all that they’re reading me. Call it a quirk, but I don’t like that.
phekfaupe said,
December 11, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
Looks like you are a true pro. Did ya study about the theme? haha