Un Authorized Syndication

A post over at ProBlogger.net is asking the following question: “Is syndicating content kosher or not…ie running someone elses content through rss into ones own blog?” And the answer to that varies depending on the circumstances. For starters, I feel that no website should be able to syndicate my full RSS feed while at the same time, displaying some sort of advertising on the page/site. This makes me think the webmaster of the site in question is trying to profit from my work. There is an exception to the rule however.

So you may ask then, what about blog scrapers who simply use an excerpt of the post but usually have the name of the post author switched around. Well, they actually link back to the original post most of the time and I’m not hard pressed to go after those that use an excerpt. Using excerpts is fine, using the full feed is not. I don’t syndicate anyone’s content without permission and it’s very unlikely I’d do so anyways. However, I am completely fine with sites who syndicate my content, only after they have received my permission to do so. An excellent example of this would be Planet WordPress managed my Ozh. Before syndicating my WordPress related content, Ozh got in touch with me and asked if he could syndicate the WordPress category on my blog in which I gave him permission to do so.

So how do you feel about those who syndicate your full RSS feed without permission? Do you syndicate content from other people on your own site?

Turning Categories Into Feeds

Out of the box, WordPress generates a number of RSS feeds for you automatically. These include feeds for comments, posts, and believe it or not, categories. I had previously thought that a plugin was required in order to turn categories into RSS feeds but that is not the case. Check this out.

WordPress supports a number of different syndication specifications, those of which are listed below along side their respected WordPress generated URL.

RSS Spec / WordPress URL

RSS 0.92 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed-rss

RDF RSS 1.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com?feed=rdf

RSS 2.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=rss2

Atom Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-atom.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=atom

Comments RSS Feed / http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss&p=50 where p stands for post and 50 is the post id.

Now here is the feed link which I found interesting.

Category RSS Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=50 where cat stands for category and 50 is the category ID.

Finding the ID number for a category is easy if the blog your browsing is not using pretty permalinks. However, if the blog IS using permalinks, you can type in the following URLs to access their RSS Subscription Links.

http://www.domain.com/feed – Main RSS Feed

http://www.domain.com/comments/feed – Comments RSS Feed

http://www.domain.com/category/category-name/feed – RSS Feed For That Category

Why would you want to know this information? Now, if you come across a site that publishes articles within only a category or two of interest, you can subscribe directly to those categories instead of the entire blog making your RSS reader that much more efficient. For instance, I occasionally publish jokes or perhaps something out of my personal life when all you really care about, are reviews or news.

The Best FeedReader Money Can Buy

Often times, I’m asked the question, “Which RSS FeedReader Do You Use“? I reply with “FeedDemon” which is then followed up with a response of “Feed What?”. I suppose no one knows of any other feed reader outside of Google Reader. I have Dave Gray, host of TheGlobalGeekPodcast to thank for pointing me towards FeedDemon. My first RSS reader was called SAGE which was an RSS Reader FireFox extension which allowed me to view my RSS feeds from within FireFox. Then, after I talked with Dave for quite awhile concerning RSS and how he manages to get all of the stories for his podcast, he told me about FeedDemon.

FeedDemon is commonly known as “The most popular Windows RSS Reader“. I’ll up the ante and call it the best reader money can buy. FeedDemon is a desktop based RSS aggregator that is currently only supported on Windows machines. So why is it the best?

FeedDemon has a wide assortment of features. One of those features is an online account with NewsGator.com. NewsGator.com is an online based FeedReader. Anything that you do within the desktop client can by synchronized to your online NewsGator account. This means that, whatever feeds you are subscribed to in FeedDemon, will be the same feeds you are subscribed to in your NewsGator online account. Each time you start or close FeedDemon, you’ll be giving the option to synchronize your account. This is awesome because, when you don’t have access to a machine with a copy of FeedDemon installed, you can use your online NewsGator account and never miss a beat.

FeedDemon begins to really shine once you end up subscribed to a bunch of feeds. If you are subscribed to a particular website, chances are you’re interested in that content. But FeedDemon has something called WATCHES. Watches provide a way to look for keywords in news items as they’re downloaded. For example, if you create a watch that looks for the word “election,” then every news item containing the word “election” will be stored in the watch. A watch searches only in feeds you’re subscribed to. I am subscribed to a number of feeds and have set up particular watches for the keywords, ICONS and Web Based Comics. Each time a post is published from a site that I am subscribed to with any of those particular keywords in the title or the content, they will show up in my watches folder. Now you know my secret as to how I find out about all of those icon packs being released on the web.

Another feature of FeedDemon that I really enjoy is called NewsBins. News Bins enable you to store news items in a central location, providing a handy way to collect items from different feeds. If you find an interesting item that you might want to read again, you can store it in a news bin for future reference. In my case, I have three particular news bins setup. One for my link blog, one for something I call WordPress weekly, and the last one is for stuff to write about. What’s neat about these newsbins is that you can share them as an RSS feed. That’s how I’ve been able to establish and update my link blog. I share my Link Blog newsbin as an RSS feed and have plugged that into the Simple Pie RSS plugin for WordPress. Check out ( How To Create A Link Blog ) if you want to do the same thing.

As for a built in browser, FeedDemon uses what looks like an edited version of Internet Explorer. The browser supports tabbed browsing, auto discovery of RSS feeds, Favorites, and a few other nifty features. This is all related to the actual web browser built in.

The actual RSS feed browser is a little different. You can browse by Full posts, Summaries or Headlines that can be grouped by Feed, Date or Title. The layout and presentation of the feedreader resembles a newspaper. The buttons from left to right are as follows: The envelope is the icon to trigger an item Read or Unread, the flag gives you a chance to flag an item. Flagged items stay around forever (or until you unflag them). The X icon deletes the specific item. The trash bin is actually the news bin icon that when clicked on, provides you a list of newsbins to copy the item to. The arrow icon is the SEND TO function. You can email the news item, copy it to your clipboard, publish it to your blog, or send the item to Delicious or Digg. The last icon will show you who is linking to that particular news story.

Organization is handled via a folder structure. It is up to you to determine how you will organize your feeds via folders. I love organized feeds as it makes browsing through them much easier. Here is an example of how I’ve decided to organize mine. Each one of those blue numbers represents the amount of new posts for those feeds.

What I’ve given you in this review is actually just a small sampling of what this program is truly capable of. They call it the best FeedReader for Windows for a reason and it truly lives up to that claim. FeedDemon costs $29.95 which is insanely cheap if you ask me. This program has so many features and the built in online account synchronization stuff should make this thing worth $100.00 or more. If you really are interested in checking out this program, they do offer a Free trial which lasts for 30 days.

This is the feed reader I use. Which one do you use and why?

Copyright Your RSS Feed With FeedEntryHeader

FeedEntryHeader is a WordPress plugin written by Stephen Cronin. Like so many other bloggers, Stephen has been battling the scraping issue. FeedEntryHeader provides WordPress bloggers with a way of adding a copyright statement and a link to the original article which will show up at the top of your feed entries.

Why the top and not the bottom? According to Stephen, the copyright that appears at the bottom of your feed entries has little impact because of it’s location. Also, if a splogger is scraping an excerpt of your content, chances are, the copyright statement won’t be added into the entry.

You can customize the text that is shown in the copyright area by changing the HTML and associated tags. However, the default message should be fine for most people.

As Stephen and the commenter’s on his blog note, this will not stop scrapers, but this is a step in the right direction. All WordPress bloggers should install this plugin as it provides another opportunity for us to fight back against these jerks.

Analyze Your Feed With Visuals

BlogPerfume has developed a cool program called Feed Analysis which providers bloggers an at a glance view of just how well their FeedBurner feed is performing without having to do any sort of calculations on your own.

By the use of Feed Analysis, the number of subscribers for each month is neatly shown on the column chart. You can also view the number of subscribers, hits, views and clicks for every single day from the line chart. The best/worst day of the week is also available which is displayed on the pie chart. And also, Feed Analysis can give you an estimated value for your blog / site according to the number of your subscribers.

In order to use Feed Analysis, you need to visit the Feed Analysis page and scroll down to the text area box where you can type in your FeedBurner Feed URL. The box on the left is the amount of time and data that will appear in the graphs.

Some important things to know before you use this tool. BlogPerfume states that, they do not store your data on their server. Everything is generated via the client side. Once you close your browser window, the data will disappear.

The application is free to use and if your blog is under 3 months old, the tool will still work. However, the prediction values may be a little off due to insufficient data.

Since this blog has been around for at least 6 months, thats the amount of time I chose.

After generating the report, I was greeted with a bunch of boxes that told me the same thing;YOU NEED TO UPGRADE YOUR FLASH PLAYER. Thanks for letting me know. After visiting the Adobe Flash Player website and upgrading my player, I ended up seeing a bunch of beautiful graphs and charts which highlighted my success or lack thereof.

Here are the results of my analyzed feedburner feed.

Estimated 1 Banner Ads Value: $7 / month
Estimated Blog Worth: $417 – $834
Monthly Increase Range: 16-30 Average Increase / Month: 23
Total Increase(Last 3 Months): 61 Monthly Increase(Last 3 Months): 20
Growth Rate (Last Month): 13.01%
Average Subscribers (Current Month): 139
Predicted Subscribers After 3 Months: 201
Predicted Subscribers After 6 Months: 290
Predicted Subscribers After 12 Months: 603
Best Day of A Week: Tuesday
Worst Day of A Week: Saturday

Feed Analysis may not be complete and perfect at the moment because it is in an early stage. We need your opinions and suggestions so that Feed Analysis can evolve to provide more accurate stats and prediction. Any suggestions and opinions are welcome. If you have amazing formulas, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us directly.

If you’re interested in viewing my specific report, complete with graphs and visuals, click here. BlogPerfume is also quick to remind us that the data may be incomplete, due to the tool being at an early stage of development. If you happen to use the Feed Analysis tool on your own blog, I’d be interested in knowing your results.

51 Creative RSS Buttons

Bloggers Journey has an interesting post today which is nothing more than 51 different RSS buttons that you can use on your blog. They range from the typical RSS orange square to the huge RSS orb. Do you find it weird that I don’t have any big orange RSS icons on this blog? I guess I’m different that way.

At any rate, here are some of the icons featured on the site.

A Few Updates Worth Mentioning

First off, I’d like to thank those of you who participated in the Live Chat last night. I had a blast talking to you in real-time and I think I’m going to make it a weekly occurrence. Every Friday between the hours of 9PM EST and 10PM EST, I’ll be hanging around the blog to chat with whomever wants to chat. So who showed up to the party last night? Sierra, Brad of Strangework.com, Ronald of the ReadersAppreciationProject, Mark Rizzn – Contributing Editor over at Mashable.com, and John Kolbert of Simply-Basic.com. Thanks guys for making the chat a success. The event is logged within the shoutbox itself so if you’re interested, you can browse the back pages of the shoutbox to see what was discussed. I really enjoyed my conversation with Brad concerning Facebook and OpenSocial which will probably turn into a blog post.

Asides from the chat, I have received numerous links pointing me to helpful guides for those that are starting a forum community. I’ve read them all, and I have taken at least one of the hints and implemented it into the forum. I have slashed the number of forums to post in from 20 to about 7. I hope this encourages more people to visit and post within the forum. I’m also working on installing a PHPBB mod which will help me syndicate the forum as a whole, or seperate categories. Once I have that working, keeping up to date with the forum should be easy and I’ll be able to place a widget on the front page of the blog highlighting the 5 or 10 most recent posts.

I’m still working on the MyAvatars code to figure out how to get it to work without stack overflow errors. No progress has been made just yet.

That’s all. Have a great weekend. Don’t forget to visit and sign up to the forum – Jeffro2pt0 Forum

FeedBurner In Glitching Mode Today

Look like I wasn’t the only one to notice a sharp decline in my RSS subscriber count. Earlier this morning, my subscriber count fell from 115 to 69. According to Darren Rowse, the problem seems to center around the Google Feedfetcher stats not displaying today. These types of errors with Feedburner happen on occasion and to those of you who are freaking out, calm down. The numbers usually return to normal after 24hrs.

Smashing Magazine On RSS

Smashing Magazine has put together an interesting article that describes what RSS is and why it’s a good idea to have an RSS icon on your site. It’s interesting to note that not long ago, RSS icons were merely graphics with XML on them, which was wrong. XML is the markup language, not the syndication itself. SM also goes into detail regarding the different RSS icons that exist and the different ways to tell your visitors that you have an RSS subscription feed without always having to use the STANDARD icon. You can check out the article here.

By the way, I thought it was hilarious to see a page that contains the world’s LARGEST RSS icon on the planet. I am REALLY tempted to place it on this page to see what sort of reactions I get!

This article makes me think that perhaps my RSS button is not clearly defined enough. What do you think?

Jeffro2pt0 Forum Update

I’ve spent the last 5-6 hours putting what I hope will be the finishing touches on the forum. Special thanks to Foomandoonian, Simply-Basic, Mike and SierraK for signing up to the forum and helping me iron out some issues that were discovered.

I’ve tidied up the design so it looks the same in both FireFox and IE 7. I’ve added an entirely new icon set to help distinguish between new posts, sticky posts, ect. I also modified some link colors as well as some background colors. As per Sierra’s suggestion, I have turned the forum header/logo image into a link which will take you to the blog homepage when clicked on.

About syndication. Unfortunately, PHPBB RC7 does not come with any syndication out of the box and will not be shipping with any in the final version. Instead, I will have to rely on a mod author to create a syndication mod once PHPBB has been finalized which should be any month now. Until then, I suggest making sure that the check box to be notified upon a reply to a thread or topic you have posted on is checked. This should send you an email anytime someone replies to a thread you have posted in.

We already have some conversations ongoing within the forum so don’t be shy. Register an account and get in on the action. Click here to view the forums.

On the topic of updates, I wanted to let you know that I have finally fixed the “text highlight” bug which was apparent in FireFox. It had something to do with using a white image as a background. When a user viewing this blog in FireFox would drag their cursor over some text to perform a copy and paste, the highlight would blend in with the background causing confusion as to whether the text you wanted selected was their or not. This issue has been fixed.

I also tried to replicate the Internet Explorer Stack Overflow errors as I wanted to fix those as well. However, no matter how many times I refreshed the site, I could not get those errors to appear. Mike, if they happen again, the first thing I would advise you to do is to install IE7. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll continue to investigate.

Now that most of the hard work concerning the forum has been taken cared of, expect to see some content added to the blog this week.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

syndication