Apologies to RSS readers

I had an issue with a blog aggregator that made me realize I don’t want to give full content to my RSS feed, not even with Angusman’s copyright plugin.

I switched on the WordPress “summary” RSS option and my RSS posts immediately began to look funky. A trip to the forum taught me that WordPress strips HTML tags from the RSS summary if the excerpt field is empty.

So I immediately created excerpts for all my posts excerpt fields… only to discover the feeds STILL looked bad, because it’s hard to tell they’re only excerpts.

The feed may continue to go nuts this weekend as I figure it out.

7 Replies to “Apologies to RSS readers”

  1. That’s a great plugin! Thanks!

    But dang. That article Ozh wrote about keeping full content RSS feeds… maybe I should keep the full feed after all.

    Oy! All that work I did today… all that RSS insanity… was it for naught?

  2. Well, IMO, RSS feeds are a convenience to the reader. They provide a way for the reader to read your site’s content without ever having to visit it. Now, if you are trying to make money off of your site, then should have summary feeds, in order to “encourage” visits to your site. But, if you aren’t trying to make money off of your site, why bother? Just leave the feeds at full content, you readers will appreciate it.

    You have experienced your first Splog, and you will probably experience more. You will also find several technology-related Splogs filled with MacManX.com’s content. I tried to change my feeds to summaries in order to combat this, but it accomplished absolutely nothing. The Splogs were filled with summaries of my content, but they were still will filled with my content. So, in the end, I chose to activate Angsuman’s copyright plugin and switched back to full content feeds. My readers thanked me.

    Remember, a spammer’s goal is to always cause an inconvenience to someone. Don’t let them inconvenience you any further than they already have.

    MacManX.com is my blog, and my needs rightfully come first, but my readers have always come in as a close second. I try to pay no more attention to the spammers than I have to.

  3. I agree with MacManX. Aggregators do not need your feeds. They just use your website. Especially if they don’t publish full content but small summaries. The bots are just reading and quoting content machines and can be run with any source.

    As a weblog author personally I don’t care about being quoted and linked at machine generated website. It’s the nature of the web. As long as you publish your own content, there will be links to your site with summaries and quotations, like search engine results, splog listings and human edited references.

    Sometimes its possible to keep the bot outside with robots.txt. But you need to identify the bot first, thats difficult enough. Otherwise you may have to unsubscribe manually, in the last resort with forceful public removal requests.

  4. Keep full feeds.
    I run lots of keyword rss searches, including ‘tamba2’ so as soon as another site uses my work, I find out. That way not only do I get to visit a whole lot of sites that say nice things, I also get to see the splogs – and I can comment and delete their links.

    Blogdigger
    Technorati
    Feedster
    Google
    All good for setting up rss searches.

    This way you get to jump on the splogs and your readers get a full feed 🙂

  5. I turned the full feeds back on — causing much more feed insanity, I’m sure. Sorry!

    But guys, if you look through the top blogs listed at Technorati and TTLB, it seems the majority of them use partial feeds. Does this mean the blogging elite is headed for a fall because they’re not taking advantage of feeds? Or is it because they’re so big they don’t have to cater to their regular readers?

  6. I never ever look through Top anything 🙂

    I think a lot of people use partial feeds – and really do use ‘teasers’ – because their ads are on their page and they want us to click them to make them money. I’m aware of people that easily make in excess of $10/day. Not much until you add it up over a month – and offering full feeds would kill that off. Arguably they are having to blog now rather than blogging for the sake of it. Not that I care – I see very very few ads.

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