Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks recently declared that people should do “nothing” in response to other sites scraping their content. I totally get what Chris is saying here. He is basically saying that the original source of content is better than scrapers because:

• it’s on a domain with more trust.
• you published that article first.
• it’s coded better for SEO than theirs.
• it’s better designed than theirs.
• it isn’t at risk for serious penalization from search engines.

If these things are all true, then I agree, you have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, that’s a tall order for many sites on the Web today. Although most scraping sites are pure and utter crap, the software available for automating the production of decent-quality websites is getting better everyday. More and more I’ve been seeing scraper sites that look and feel authentic because they are using some sweet WordPress theme and a few magical plugins. In the past, it was easy to spot a scraper site, but these days it’s getting harder to distinguish between scraped and original content. Not just for visitors, but for search engines too.

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I checked my Feedburner subscriber count on April 2nd and was surprised to see that the number of RSS subscribers had dropped from around 1800 to around 1100. The next day, my subscriber count decreased again, this time to around 700. Today, my Feedburner statistics increased slightly to around 1000 subscribers. So, in the course of three days I lost around 40% of my loyal readers, according to Google Feedburner. Will I get these subscribers back? Will my Google subscriber count return to normal? Why did my Feedburner count drop in the first place? Let’s explore the issue and try to answer these critical questions.

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With the recent Feedburner service outage, many sites across the Web experienced severe drops in their Feedburner subscriber counts. Apparently, Google is requiring all Feedburner accounts to be transferred over to Google by the end of February. In the midst of this mass migration, chaotic subscriber data has been reported to include everything from dramatic count drops and fluctuating reach statistics to zero-count values and dreaded “N/A” subscriber-count errors. Obviously, displaying erroneous subscriber-count data on your site is not a good thing. Fortunately, there are several ways to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

Over at CSS Newbie, author Rob Glazebrook weighs in with an excellent point about covering your bases when displaying your Feedburner subscriber count. As explained in the article, Feedburner’s handy API makes it easy to tap your data and display your subscriber count on your blog. Despite its best intentions, however, Feedburner occasionally returns inaccurate data or even no data at all for the subscriber count. For those of us who care about the accuracy of our publicly displayed feed statistics, displaying information like this on your site is simply unacceptable:

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If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to use Feedburner to track your feed statistics, this article describes a relatively simple, “roll-your-own” alternative. Instead of redirecting your feed traffic through Feedburner, keep your original feed URLs and place the following code into a file named “feed_stats.php” (or whatever) and upload to your server:

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Time for another Feedburner redirect tutorial! In our previous FeedBurner-redirect post, I provide an improved HTAccess method for redirecting your site’s main feed and comment feed to their respective Feedburner URLs. In this tutorial, we are redirecting individual WordPress category feeds to their respective FeedBurner URLs. We will also look at the complete code required to redirect all of the above: the main feed, comments feed, and of course any number of individual category feeds. Let’s jump into it..

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Recently, a client wanted to deliver her blog feed through Feedburner to take advantage of its excellent statistical features. Establishing a Feedburner-delivered feed requires three things: a valid feed URL, a Feedburner account, and a redirect method. For permalink-enabled WordPress feed URLs, configuring the required redirect is straightforward: either install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin or use an optimized HTAccess technique. Unfortunately, for sites without permalinks enabled, the Feedsmith plugin is effectively useless, and virtually all of the HTAccess methods currently available on the Web are designed for permalink-enabled configurations. In this article, we will modify our existing HTAccess technique to work with default WordPress feed URLs.

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Recently, I received a bizarre email accusing me of calling someone out on their fake Feedburner subscriber count. Apparently, some desperate blogger had been claiming to have something like 30,000 Feedburner subscribers when in reality they only had around 700. From what I could tell, the fraudulent site was displaying a counterfeit Feedburner subscriber-count badge using some fancy CSS image-replacement or something. Whatever. I really could care less, but the information contained in the email got me thinking:

Providing an easy way for visitors to verify your subscriber count is a good idea..

Enabling visitors to quickly and easily verify your claimed subscriber count fosters a sense of credibility and legitimacy concerning you and your site. Especially for larger feed counts, validating your claim removes doubt, improves perception, and solidifies reputation. Without some sort of verification, new visitors to your site have no practical way of determining the validity of your claim. Reassuring your guests with an official “verification” link is an excellent way to demonstrate your authenticity and sincerity. Users may or may not actually click on the link, but its mere presence provides a clear signal of your site’s integrity. You know, like saying “look, this is the real McCoy — I’m not faking popularity for personal gain.”

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This may surprise you, but I post quite a bit of content that never appears in the site’s main feed. It is my impression that a vast majority of subscribers are interested in web/graphic-design and development-related topics, and are really much less interested (if at all) in the miscellaneous odds and ends that wind up in the ever-expanding Perishable Press database.

In the past, the process of excluding content from the main feed typically involved changing the post-date to something at least a year or so in the past. The thinking was that I could always return to these posts at some point in the future and put them back into sequential order. Although effective, this process quickly became far too tedious and time-consuming to prove practical. Keeping my eyes open for possible solutions, I have accumulated several excellent techniques for excluding content from WordPress feeds.

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Recently, I found occasion to consolidate and localize my WordPress feeds. A couple of years ago, shortly after I first began using Feedburner to deliver and monitor my site’s feeds, I began listing my Feedburner-assigned feed URL in addition to my localized WordPress feed URL. As time went on, inconsistent feed linkage here at Perishable Press had greatly convoluted the feed-subscription process. Confounding factors include:

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In a previous article, I explain how to redirect your WordPress feeds to Feedburner. Redirecting your WordPress feeds to Feedburner enables you to take advantage of their many freely provided, highly useful tracking and statistical services. Although there are a few important things to consider before optimizing your feeds and switching to Feedburner, many WordPress users redirect their blog’s two main feeds — “main content” and “all comments” — using either a plugin or directly via htaccess. Here is the htaccess code as previously provided here at Perishable Press:

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This article will help beginners understand a few “feed” essentials: what they are, how they work, and how to use them..

So you are a little new to the Web. As you surf around, you keep noticing these little orange squares and multicolored boxes placed next to phrases such as these:

• Subscribe via RSS
• Subscribe via XML
• Subscribe via Atom
• Subscribe via Feedburner
• Subscribe to My Feed
• Subscribe to Main Content
• Subscribe to Comments

..and so on. Although these invitations to “subscribe” come in many flavors, they are all basically doing the same thing: enabling visitors to receive information from the site without having to manually visit the site itself. By subscribing to your favorite sites, you can stay current with updated content delivered to the “feed reader” of your choice. There are many feed readers freely available around the Web. In many cases, you can even have feed subscriptions delivered directly to your email account. We’ll talk more about different types of feed readers here in a bit. For now, let’s examine a few different types of feeds and how they might be used.

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For future reference, this article covers each of the many ways to access your WordPress-generated feeds. Several different URL formats are available for the various types of WordPress feeds — posts, comments, and categories — for both permalink and default URL structures. For each example, replace “http://domain.tld/” with the URL of your blog. Note: even though your blog’s main feed is accessible through many different URLs, there are clear benefits to using a single, consistent feed URL throughout your site.

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Just a quick tip on how to create error-free links to feed validation services for feeds that are redirected through Feedburner. For example, let’s say our site’s main feed is originally located at:

http://domain.tld/feed/

If we wanted to provide our visitors with a link that would enable them to automatically validate our feed using a free service such as feedvalidator.org ¹, we would create the link as follows:

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My current adventure into the fascinating realms of site redesign and optimization has yielded several chunks of fruit related to managing and delivering feed content. One of my primary concerns regarding the overhaul of Perishable Press is streamlined content delivery and rights management. An important area of convergence for these two factors involves the management and delivery of a site’s syndicated content. In this article, I explain the shortcomings of many default feed configurations and present an effective overall strategy for better feed management.

When it comes to managing syndicated content, most blogging platforms enable bloggers to provide a multitude of feeds to their readers. For example, WordPress (as well as many other blogging platforms) automatically generates feeds for each of the following channels:

• Main content feed (includes all posts)
• Main comments feed (includes all comments)
• Unlimited number of individual category feeds
• Any combination of individual category feeds as a single feed
• A feed for each the comments given for any particular post
• A feed for each blog author or contributor
• A feed comprised of virtually any combination of the above feeds

Then, as you consider this astronomical number of feeds, multiply each possibility by a factor of at least three: feeds generated via RSS 2.0, RSS 0.92, and Atom formats. Then, as if that were not enough, some bloggers throw third party services such as Feedburner into the mix and link directly to those feeds as well. Now add a zillion non-canonical URL variations into the mix. Eventually, your eyes begin to bug out and you go a little bonkers trying to keep track of them all.

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If you are using Feedburner to deliver your feeds, chances are high that most — if not all — of your loyal readers have subscribed to the Feedburner-specific version of your feed’s URL. This is not a good idea for a couple of important reasons:

• Complete content-delivery failure if/when the Feedburner service goes down
• Cohesive branding strategy impossible because visitors see Feedburner’s name in feed URL instead of your own

At this point, millions of feed subscribers have Feedburner-branded feed URLs listed in their feed readers. If/when the venerable Feedburner service should ever fail, the results would be disastrous. Feedburner needs to provide a comprehensive way for content producers to deliver their feeds through user-specified channels. Currently, Feedburner demonstrates that this is possible by enabling a partial method of redirecting feed traffic to custom URLs.

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Today I am happy to announce that Perishable Press has been deemed worthy of citizenship on Planet WordPress! Planet WordPress is an incredible WordPress resource, bringing together some of the Web’s finest WordPress contributors, plugin developers, and theme designers. The Planet WordPress feed currently features nearly 50 hand-selected WordPress bloggers and aggregates their syndicated content every two hours. As proclaimed at the site, Planet WordPress is “The Epicenter of Everything WordPress” — definitely a great way to stay current with the wonderful world of WordPress.

Needless to say, I am most grateful to Ozh for hooking me up with this excellent opportunity. Cheers! ;)

Want to make sure that your feeds are not indexed by Google and other compliant search engines? Add the following code to the channel element of your XML-based (RSS, etc.) feeds:

<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" />

Here is an example of how I use this tag for Perishable Press feeds (vertical spacing added for emphasis):

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It must be national “update-your-WordPress-plugins” month around here or something. First a completely renovated version of Category LiveBookmarks Plus, then a WP-2.3-compatible facelift for BlogStats PCC, and now a completely widgetized & automated version of the popular AddMySite plugin. Coincidence? — I think not..

Due to popular demand, I am proud to announce the release of a new widgetized version of the free AddMySite (AMS) plugin for WordPress. The new version (0.88) is compatible with all versions of WordPress (including all WP 2.3+), and is easily integrated into any widget-capable area (e.g., sidebars, footers, etc.) of any widget-friendly WordPress theme. Simply activate, drag & drop into place, and enjoy! Once the widget has been activated, AMS enables site visitors to easily and quickly add your site or feed to as many as 40 social-bookmarking and/or feed aggregation services.

By default, version 0.88 of AMS automatically uses the information specified in your WP Admin for your blog name, blog address, and feed URL. Thus, manual code editing is no longer required for the plugin to work as intended. However, if you would like to customize any of the predefined variables, simply use the nifty popup menu provided on the AMS widget icon. Everything is completely widgetized, automated, and customizable! For more information about AddMySite, or to download yourself a fresh copy, visit the official AMS information page »

CLB+ As many WordPress users now realize, there have been many fundamental changes in the new version of WordPress. The latest version of WordPress — 2.3 — features a considerably revamped database structure, including a complete reorganization and redistribution of the wp_categories table. Unfortunately, such database alterations have rendered inoperable many popular plugins, proving quite unfortunate not only for millions of WordPress users, but also for those of us who donate time, effort, and resources toward the development of freely available WordPress plugins. Thus, with the advent of WordPress 2.3, developers whose plugins have ceased to function must now decide whether or not to continue their support. In my humble opinion, philanthropic plugin developers have several choices:

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Recently, I found myself drowning in an ocean of RSS feeds. Even after switching to Google Reader, which definitely speeds up the process of plowing through posts, I was wasting too much time consuming subscribed content. Thus, in an effort to find balance between saving time and staying current, I executed the following five-step feed portfolio makeover:

1. Drop lame feeds. Previously, I had subscribed to a number of feeds simply because they were recommended or mentioned in an article somewhere. Unfortunately, sound referrals and interesting commentary do not necessarily equate with strong syndicated content. I often found myself reading post after post about stuff that was not useful or even interesting. After some careful deliberation, I dropped around 25 of these lame feeds and moved on with my life.
2. Consolidate similar feeds. After following my previous collection of feeds for awhile, I began to notice ridiculous amounts of redundancy. There is just no need to subscribe to multiple blogs covering the same material unless they blog from truly unique perspectives. After choosing one or two authority bloggers for each of my focus areas, I unsubscribed to the “echo” feeds and thus reduced my feed collection by at least 20.
3. Eliminate overly aggressive feeds. I love to see fresh content from bloggers who post quality posts, especially when they only post once in awhile. It’s like getting a scooby snack or something and I just love it. Conversely, I hate to see overly ambitious bloggers bomb my reader with a jillion junk posts about the same old garbage — nothing new to say and no new ways of saying it. Needless to say, I kicked about 10 of these feed hogs straight to the curb.
4. Subscribe to summary feeds. When it comes to staying current with world news, tech news, and other frequently reported topics, it is easy to flood your reader with unnecessary content. Fortunately, many of the most prolific news-related sites provide an alternate summary feed that consolidates and highlights the day’s or week’s worth of material into a single post. By trading full feeds for summary feeds, I greatly reduced the quantity of incoming feed content without sacrificing the quality of its information.
5. Drop John Chow like a bad habit. Just kidding. Chow is great, but really, how many blogs about blogging and getting stinking rich do you really need? The point here is to craft yourself a diverse collection of enlightening, educational, and enriching feeds. Trade mindlessness and redundancy for thoughtfulness and original content. Drop the mind-numbing “list” sites and find sincere bloggers with experience and wisdom. I am continually fine-tuning my feed diet towards a diverse, eclectic, and original collection of insightful, high-quality content written by authoritative bloggers who aren’t pitching at me around every corner.

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In our previous article, we explain the process of allowing Feedburner to access your hotlink-protected images. The article details the entire process, which covers the basics of hotlink protection and involves adding several lines of code to your htaccess file. In this article, we skip the detailed explanations and present only the main points. The discussion is very similar for both Feedburner and Google Reader, and may be extrapolated to serve virtually any purpose.

If you are using htaccess to protect your images from hotlinking and have yet to check your feeds in Google Reader, you may be in for a little surprise. Unless you explicitly permit Google Reader access, your htaccess rules may be inadvertently preventing subscribers from viewing the images in your feeds. The same is true for Google Reader Mobile, which is probably far more popular than you may realize.

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Recently, we installed and configured the excellent WordPress Feedburner plugin by the venerable Steve Smith ¹. The plugin basically redirects our various WordPress-powered content feeds to Feedburner, which then delivers them to subscribers. This method enables us to take advantage of Feedburner’s excellent statistical tools. Further, all of the action happens silently, beneath the surface, and without the subscriber even realizing it.

After a few weeks running the plugin with great success, we began hearing reports of broken and missing images messing up our feeds. After some investigating, we realized that our tried-and-true anti-hotlinking htaccess rules were doing their job a little too well — blocking everyone outside our domain from accessing our image content — including Feedburner.

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This quick tutorial explains how to add images to both Atom and RSS feeds. Although both formats allow for image-inclusion, feed-reader support for image-display is currently quite limited. Hopefully, that will change in the near future..

Images for Atom Feeds

Images included within Atom feeds must have a ratio of either 1:1 or 2:1. There are no other restrictions as to file type or size. Use the <icon> XML element for URL’s targeting 1:1 images. Otherwise, use the <logo> XML element for URL’s targeting 2:1 images. Either element should be placed in the <feed> element:

<feed>
   <icon>http://domain.tld/path/icon.ico</icon>
   <logo>http://domain.tld/path/logo.gif</logo>
</feed>

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Ignore this post..

[Edit] Note to WP 2.0.5 users: Everything was working fine on this site before upgrading to WP 2.0.5. After upgrading, apparently, our feeds stopped validating* and the BDP RSS Aggregator plugin refused to update our own feeds. After several hours investigating the situation, we determined that the Live Comment Preview plugin was interfering with our feeds validating, while the upgraded WordPress (2.0.5) was responsible for problems with the BDP plugin.

Here is a copy of our recent comment posted at the BDP plugin website:

Comment by m0n on Wednesday 6 December 2006 at 4:28 am

I was running BDPRSS v.0.2.2 just fine before upgrading to WP 2.0.5. After the upgrade, I noticed that feeds from my own site are no longer updated. They are apparently polled, but reflect a ‘last updated’ value of the day I upgraded WP. I have, since the WP upgrade, posted several new articles that appear fine directly, through feedburner, etc.

I have tried just about everything (restoring old BDP databases, deleting and adding new feed entries in the admin panel, deleting cache, you name it, etc.). I have also tried upgrading to BDP 0.4.10, but to no avail. My own feeds will not update either in the BDP admin panel or on the web page itself. Adding different feed formats does not work either.

So, just a note to hopefully garner some more clues concerning this. I realize it may not be an emergency, because who reads their own feeds for crying out loud. Perhaps there are others out there with the same problem. If possible, try adding any of your own feeds (on WP 2.0.5) and see if they work. Well, thanks for listening!

The whole event pretty much zapped the weekend of any free-time, but the good news is that we managed to get everything working properly (according to our needs) once again — feeds all validate and we have previews of our own feeds via the BDP plugin — and we are still running WP 2.0.5! We’ll just bill the incident as another 8-hour "learning experience"..

If anyone is experiencing anything similar to the issues mentioned in this post, we would love to hear about it — drop us a line!

Update: [ May 28th, 2007 ] - Issue resolved! After moving the Perishable Press website to a new server, our WordPress feeds once again began updating directly through our own site (via BDP plugin, et al). Apparently, as our previous host continued to disable important PHP functions (as a solution to potential security vulnerabilities), the various plugins and scripts employing the disabled functions inevitably became useless. Thus, we attribute the source our non-updating feed issue directly to server limitations (and lazy technicians). While we cannot at this point discern exactly the cause of the problem, suffice it to say that our new host provides all the functionality needed for everything to run properly (and smoothly, we might add). So cheers to everyone who helped us with suggestions and ideas for this bizarre dilemma. We now enjoy fully functional and validating WordPress feeds. Case closed.

Footnotes

• *Here are the feed validators we use:
• ¹ rss.scripting.com
• ² feedvalidator.org
• ³ validome.org

This brief tutorial explains two methods for adding RSS feed link icons to category listings. Let’s say that you have a list of category links, where each link targets a specific category view. Now let’s say that, next to each category link, you would like to provide a icon that links to that particular category’s syndicated feed. So, rather than cluttering up your page with two sets of category links — one for category views and another for category feeds — consolidate links and simplify your site by providing both sets of links in a logical, streamlined format.

Method One: A Static Category/Category-Feed List via wp_list_cats

Category Links via "wp_list_cats" The easiest way to create a set of category/category-feed links is to use the native WordPress function, wp_list_cats. This function creates a customizable set of static category links that may be used in or out of the WordPress loop.

Category links created this way are static in that the same categories are displayed for every type of page view. Thus, if configured to display categories "A", "B", and "C", the wp_list_cats function will create links for A, B, and C for post views, page views, archive views, category views, and every other view-type for that matter.

Nonetheless, despite this limitation, wp_list_cats provides an easy way to create a category feed icon links next their respective category links. Simply add the following to the location of your choice within your WP-powered document:

<?php wp_list_cats('feed_image=http://domain.com/path/feed-icon.gif&feed=XML Feed&optioncount=1&children=0'); ?>

In this code example, we are using the following parameters:

feed_image=http://domain.com/path/feed-icon.gif

This parameter creates the feed icon link next to each category link. Change the domain, path, and file name according to your particular setup.

feed=XML Feed

This parameter produces the requisite alt & title attributes for the specified feed icon (if any), and also produces title attributes for link anchor tags.

optioncount=1

This parameter indicates whether or not the function writes the category post count next to the link. "1" = yes, please display category post counts, "2" = no, please do not display post counts.

children=0

This parameter instructs the function to include or exclude subcategories in the set of category links. "1" = yes, please show all subcategories, "2" = no, please omit any subcategories from the category list.

This function also provides several handy parameters that are not discussed here. Please see the WordPress Codex¹ for complete information concerning wp_list_cats.

Method Two: A Dynamic Category/Feed List via Category LiveBookmarks

A more sophisticated, comprehensive method of providing users with category/feed links is delivered via Monzilla Media’s essential plugin, Category LiveBookmarks Plus ². Category LiveBookmarks Plus (CLB+) automatically produces a highly customizable set of dynamic category/feed links anywhere within your WP-powered blog. Plus, in addition to creating a custom set of feed links, CLB+ also creates contextually relevant LiveBookmark autodiscovery feed links to the head element of your document (see plugin page for more details). Here are a few examples of the different format options available via CLB+:

Left-aligned feed links
Text-based feed links
Right-aligned feed links

Of course, more configurations are possible, as well as many other customizable settings that enable users to create an ideal set of dynamically changing feed links throughout your site. Simply install the plugin and change the settings within the plugin file to customize your own set of category/feed links. Further, the CLB+ plugin creates a dynamic set of category/feed links that changes according to page view-type in order to provide only relevant feeds, as referenced via the particular page contents.

Regardless of which method you use, consolidating your category links with your category feed links will reduce clutter, streamline navigation, and promote simplicity. Thanks for listening — God Bless!

Footnotes

• ¹ WordPress Codex: wp_list_cats
• ² Category LiveBookmarks Plus Plugin
• ³ A Nice Collection of RSS Feed Icons