I was pleasantly surprised to find that my FeedEntryHeader plugin was featured on Episode 28 of the WordPress Weekly podcast. The mention was fairly brief,  but it’s nice to be noticed by such an influential podcast.

I’d like to thank Keith Murray for making FeedEntryHeader his plugin of the week. WordPress Weekly is one of the regular features of my 40 minute train ride into the Brisbane CBD. I always listen to the plugin of the week section with interest, but never thought one of my WordPress plugins would appear.

It’s probably lucky that I found out that FeedEntryHeader was featured before I listened to Episode 28. If I’d been taken by surprise on the train, there’s no telling what my reaction may have been!

Anyway, Keith mentioned the threat of having your content scraped by a splog and the role that FeedEntryHeader can play in combating this.

Ironically, I found out that FeedEntryHeader had been featured on WordPress Weekly when I followed a backlink in my WordPress Admin Dashboard. It took me to a splog, which appears to have been scraping Weblog Tools Collection! There was a copy of the Episode 28 page, word for word, including the link to the FeedEntryHeader home page.

So… I found out that WordPress Weekly Episode 28 had mentioned my plugin as a weapon against splogs, through one of these very splogs, that had scraped the Episode 28 page! This is the bit where I say that Weblog Tools Collection should use FeedEntryHeader right?

Well, as it happens, they’d been scraped by a reasonably nice splog, which had left all the post’s links intact, including the post title link pointing at the original post. However, FeedEntryHeader would have made it clearer to people that they were reading the post on the wrong blog. It could also help them with the other, not so nice splogs.

Anyway, it was very nice to have been mentioned by WordPress Weekly. It’s a great podcast and I have a lot of respect for the guys that run it.

As a followup to my announcement of the new FeedEntryHeader plugin, I thought I’d share a screenshot of it in action. Predictably, the announcement post was scraped within minutes of me publishing it. Here is what the output looks like on the splog.

As you can see, the links have been stripped, but the URL remains. Hopefully anyone reading this page will work out that they aren’t viewing the original article and copy and paste the URL into the browser to read the original.

It’s also worth noting that all formatting has been removed, as have been the images. If you are reading a post that looks like this, you should be able to recognise it as a splog even if there is no copyright statement.

Marking Splog Trackbacks As Spam

In the comments of the previous post, Jonathon mentions that he is receiving trackback from the splogs. If you get such trackbacks, mark them as spam. It’s very important you do this.

If enough people mark trackbacks from a particular splog as spam, Askimet will start marking all trackbacks from that splog as spam automatically.

If you leave such trackbacks in place you may be passing PageRank to the splog. One of the reasons that we are fighting a losing battle is because of the vast number of links such splogs get.

Many of the original authors get a trackback, but don’t realise it’s from a splog because they don’t follow it. If you don’t follow all your trackbacks, you won’t know if someone is writing something nice about you, or scraping you.

Digital Fingerprint

Someone asked me why I couldn’t use the Digital Fingerprint plugin instead. I looked at Digital Fingerprint before writing FeedEntryHeader. I haven’t used it, but it seems to be a great idea and I recommend you check it out. However, it’s purpose differs from what I wanted FeedEntryHeader to do.

Digital Fingerprint’s purpose is to track who’s scraping your content, while FeedEntryHeader’s purpose is to redirect readers back to your site.

The idea behind Digital Fingerprint is that it inserts a ‘fingerprint’ into your feed, so that later you can search for pages that contain this fingerprint. This should let you find any splogs who have scraped your  post. The fingerprint needs to be unique (ie won’t appear anywhere else on the Internet).

It seems to be possible to use a copyright message as the digital fingerprint, but it would have to be generic (ie the same for all posts). There’s no ability to display the post URL, which makes sense – after all, you want to do one search to find the scraped content, not a different search for each post.

The strength of FeedEntryHeader is the fact that it includes the URL back to the original post. The idea is that users will see the copyright statement before they read the article, work out what’s going on and use the URL to visit your site to read the original post.

There are other plugins that do something similar in the footer. That’s too late. There’s less chance the reader will visit your site if they’ve already read the post. Also, some splogs chop the bottom of the post off.

Anyway, FeedEntryHeader and Digital Fingerprint have different purposes, both of them worthwhile. Although I haven’t tried it yet, I see no reason why they cannot be used together.

I recently discovered that my feed was being scraped. It’s very frustrating to find your content appearing in full on another website – so I decided to do something about it.

The result? A new WordPress plugin called FeedEntryHeader that allows you to add a copyright statement and a link to the original article, to the top of your feed entries.

Why Use It?

There are several WordPress plugins that allow you to add a copyright statement to the end of feed entries. However the copyright statement has limited impact by the time the reader gets to the bottom of the page.

The reader is more likely to take action if they see the copyright statement at the beginning of the page, along with a link to the original article.

It won’t stop feed scraping, but it should ensure that a copyright statement and a link to the original article appear in the scraped content.

What Does It Look Like?

Here is a screenshot from my feed in Google Reader:

As you can see, the following message has been added to the feed entry:

Copyright © 2007 Stephen Cronin. Visit the original article at http://www.scratch99.com/2007/11/feed-reading-models/.

Can I Change The Message?

Yes. The message is fully customisable. Simple HTML can be used and there are tags allowing you to use site name, site URL, post name, post URL and author name from the WordPress database.

The default message uses the post URL, rather than the post name, as the anchor text. This can be changed, but many scrapers remove all links, leaving only the anchor text behind. If the URL is the anchor text, it will remain.

Although this plugin was designed for displaying a copyright statement, there is no reason that you could not display other items instead.

Where Do I Get It?

Further information about the plugin can be found at the FeedEntryHeader plugin home page. The plugin is also available for download from the plugin home page.

Over the past six months, my feed reading habits have evolved. I used to read summary feeds in a desktop reader, but I’ve moved towards the more common model of reading full post feeds in a web based reader.

I wasn’t really conscious of this change, until I read Meg’s Hey You! Yes you, with the Partial Feed. I started off by defending summary feeds, but ended up realising that I’d come to value full post feeds as much as most bloggers.

After some further thought, I realised that there are two distinct models of feed reading, which I outline briefly below.

The Aggregated Feed Model

When I started blogging, I mostly read aggregated feeds, such as the one for the BUMPzee No NoFollow community. I’d get hundreds of entries streaming past, many on topics I wasn’t interested in. I’d pick out the small number I wanted to read and visit the site.

For this sort of feed reading, I prefer summary feeds. When I’m skimming through hundreds, or even thousands entries, the full post is a distraction – I read too much before discarding something I don’t really want to read.

With this model, reading is based on the topic, not who is writing it.

The Individual Feed Model

I’ve slowly moved toward reading a small number of individual feeds, from sites that I’ve become a loyal reader of.

For these sites, I’m going to read everything they write. I’m not skimming, so having the full text feed is much preferable. It’s a real time saver to be able to read most items in my reader and only visit the site for those I want  to comment on.

With this model, reading is based on who is writing the content.

Natural Progression From Aggregated To Individual Feeds

I suspect most people start with the aggregated feed model then move to the individual feed model over time. The reason for this is simple.

When starting out, most of us don’t know any individual sites – but we do know what we are interested in. Therefore it is natural to read by topic and aggregated feeds assist us in finding posts we may be interested in.

Over time, we sift the grain from the chaff. Once we work out which sites we want to read on a daily basis, it makes sense to go directly to the source and subscribe to the individual feed.

Desktop Readers vs Web Based Readers

Traditionally, I have preferred using desktop readers (such as SharpReader) to web based readers (such as Google Reader or Bloglines). This is largely because I’ve been using the aggregated feed model of reading.

When reading an aggregated feed, I’m skimming through hundreds of entries, pressing Delete, Delete, Delete. I need an instant response -  lag of any kind is not tolerated. Although the speed of web based readers has vastly improved, thanks to AJAX, they still can’t match the speed of a desktop reader. Of course, most web based readers don’t let you delete things, which annoys me. When I decide I don’t want something, I don’t want it!

When reading individual feeds, I’m not skimming, so speed is not such a factor. This makes web based readers more attractive, although I’m still annoyed I can’t delete!

As it happens, I was forced to adopt a web based reader because many of the individual feeds I subscribe to use FeedBurner. Unfortunately, FeedBurner URLs are blocked here in China, so my desktop reader can’t access their feeds directly. Google Reader’s server can access FeedBurner URLs – and I can access Google Reader. So I now use Google Reader.

What Sites Offer – Full Post vs Summary Feeds

So far, I’ve been discussing what I prefer to read. Most full post vs summary feed discussions focus on which format sites offer.

Read Meg’s post and the accompanying comments and you’ll find that most people strongly believe that the full post should be offered. This is because they are using the individual feed model of reading. I’m not going to go over why the full post should be offered. That’s been discussed often enough.

What’s really interesting to me is why some sites choose to offer a summary feed only, especially as there is such strong feelings about this in the blogosphere. The reasons I can see for this include:

1. Advertising Revenue: if people read your full post in the reader, advertising revenue is negatively impacted (less impressions, less clicks). The argument against this is that people reading your full post in their reader will come to your site to comment on some of your posts. If you don’t offer the full post feed, you may lose them all together. You may be better to offer the full feed and investigate ways to display ads in the feed.
2. Commercialisation: I am aware that some high-end blogs give away the summary feed, but charge for the full text feed. They will lose readers, as per the previous point, but they make money from the remaining readers. Unless your blog is really (and I mean really) popular, this won’t work for you. Most readers will just pass you by.
3. Content Scrapers: full post feeds mean your entire content is at risk of being scraped. This affects many sites in the blogosphere, including mine – I recently discovered that my feed is being scraped. Opinion about what can be done about this is divided. Most bloggers seem to accept this as a fact of life, while others, such as Lorelle, urge us to take action. At the very least, I’m going to add a copyright statement and a link to the full article at the top of my full post feed entries. However, like most bloggers, I’m going to continue offering a full post feed, because I don’t want to alienate my subscribers.
4. Lack Of Awareness: some people simply don’t know about the depth of feeling against summary feeds. This mostly affects new bloggers. I definitely fell into this category when I’d just started.
5. Lack Of Choice: some people prefer to read summary feeds. When they have to choose what to offer, they go with what they themselves prefer. I fell into this category and only offered a summary feed for many months. In fact, I only offered a full post feed because I’d developed DualFeeds and thought I better use my own plugin!

Blatant Plug: guess at this point, it would be remiss of me not to mention that my DualFeeds plugin allows you to offer both a full post and summary feed. If you’re not sure whether to offer a full post or summary feed, then offer both! Giving the choice to your readers is a good thing.

The Final Word

Did you start with the aggregated feed model, then move to the individual feed model? Or do you have a different model? Do you prefer a desktop or web based reader? Do you only offer a summary feed? If so why?

I’m really interested in know what people think about this, so leave me a comment below if you want to share your experience.