Just a quick note that this site is now publishing partial rss and atom feeds. So instead of seeing the entire contents in your feed reader, you will only see about the first paragraph. You will have to click through to read the full post here.
Why am I doing this? People are republishing my feed on their sites, and in it’s entirety because that’s what I publish in my rss.
Basically anybody with a free afternoon can figure out how to republish rss feeds. In the past I dealt with the couple people who did this individually, but it’s becoming harder to do and a much more frequent occurance.
For an example here’s a site I noticed doing this today (the second this week): http://headlinedepot.com/feedview.php?feedid=1850 (screenshot)
You’ll notice only partial feeds show up there now, however earlier today they were displaying the entire content of each of my posts, reading every word of my rss feed and republishing.
So after doing some research I found multiple opinions that the only way to truly protect your feed from getting hijacked is to not publish the full feed, and hence my partial feeds.
October 30th, 2005 at 8:05 pm
The other reason to limit the size of your feed is that *you’re* paying for the bandwidth for them to download the full feed.
I cut my feed back from the 25 to 10 most recent stories and limited it to the first 1024 characters - and the bandwidth to support my feeds dropped proportionally.
October 31st, 2005 at 5:26 am
On the other hand, partial feeds tend to annoy your genuine readers. I subscribe to over 150 feeds via a client-based reader, and I personally find partial feeds a major turn-off (as in, I tend to unsubscribe). I continue to subscribe to some that a least provide a near complete description of the item, so that I can make an informed decision whether or not to ‘waste my time
October 31st, 2005 at 8:22 am
I’m bummed that you’re moving to a partial feed - I read your stuff just about every day but have a very limited time to do so. So I use a feed reader to get the info, I scan it, and then file it for later if I can’t use the information right then.
Now, it is very likely that I will skim over your stuff and decide that it is too much effort (though the payback is high) to go to the articles.
I hope it works out for you though and that your intellectual property stays yours.
As I wrap this up, I wonder if it’s possible to implement a “secure feed” that requires an id and password that would allow “genuine” readers to down load the full feed. I’d be willing to sign up for that…
October 31st, 2005 at 3:20 pm
SDCaroll: I’v never thought of this from the reduction of bandwith angle but I guess that maybe true. For instance people that don’t read the post still consume the bandwidth if they’re subscribed. Fortunately though I’ve never been close to my bandwidth limit with my current hosting provider.
Tom: Yes I’m sensitive to the google/se thing. In fact this site was completely removed from google as a duplicate content site for sometime(my best guess anyway, they never actually said why), even though the original content orgininated here. I had my content removed from other sites and a few emails to the google engineers to get back in took a couple months.
As for “marketing teaser” snippets, I plan to only include the actual abbreviated text from each post.
I haven’t run across any screen scraping yet (fingers crossed), every time it’s been purely republishing the rss feed. (even worse would be using excel to scrape the site, ouch
Lance: I’m unaware of anyway to setup the “secure feed” like you mention, though it sounds like a good idea. I’m also unsure if this would prevent republishing of the feed.
I do apologize if it inconveniences anyone, but it seems like a logical solution given the circumstances.