Home made RSS logger
I noticed that Joe had resaved loads of his posts, and looked into why.
He’s got this cool little mini banner in all the posts. I went to his blog, and they weren’t visible on the blog. Soo, they must have been inserted into the RSS template.
Smart, if you have a tiny graphic in the RSS feed from a site where you have raw logs or good stats, you get logging capabilities for RSS feeds.
Just as important, with a link back to the blog, you make sure scrapers will have a bit more trouble stealing your content without giving you credit for it.
Think I need to look into that myself, Joe!
Update:
This works for Wordpress:
Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin
I made a small alteration to this plugin, to both make it do what Angsuman designed it to do, and to provide me with logging.
I wasn’t comfortable having my e-mail address potentially ending up on the web where it could be harvested, so I wanted an image (what I usually do when putting my e-mail address out there). That image also provides logging, so it works nicely. I put the whole img src tag where you can customize the e-mail address (instead of using the default one set up by the script). I tried a validator, and it seems to work. And it displays in Thunderbird, so I guess mission accomplished?
Thanks Joe, for digging it up!
————–
Forget this stuff, it doesn’t work:
Tutorial for adding image to RSS feed (oops, this is for an icon). Here: Adding image for each post. Actually, that doesn’t work too well either. Try something like this. Nah, that doesn’t work either. Help?
November 20th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Well, the resaving was due to my ususal end of semester procrastination. I rearranged the hosting of my images and had to update some posts.
Then I began wondering about how many RSS readers I had since Blogger gives you no statistics about anything. At first I was just going to do it as a short term test. But then I realized it would be very useful against RSS scrapers since I could just look at my logs to see what sites the image is loaded from.
With Blogger it is really easy. It is found under Settings, Site Feed, then Article Footer. That is also the place where you would insert AdSense for Feeds code which would also give you some tracking data now with Google Analytics, but I don’t want to put ads on my site or feed.
November 20th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
Aargh ! No Preview !! Try again:
Since index.xml or atom.xml is a single file, surely you only need the one graphical image in the common header section to do the “web bug” style tracking, which then also gets picked up and used by aggregators like Bloglines ?
e.g. in Movable Type’s RSS 2.0 template:
…
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<image>
<url>http://www.spy.org.uk/cx72.jpg</url>
<link>http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog</link>
<width>72</width>
<height>72</height>
<title>>Spy Blog</title>
</image>
<MTEntries lastn=”15″>
…
November 21st, 2005 at 11:04 am
I am not really sure how that would work, but I assume that is outside the posts. Would feed readers actually load the image?
If they do that would solve the normal user tracking, but for identifying spammers who are stealing your posts it won’t work. They aren’t going to be using the entire feed, just a few posts from it.
Having the image on each post won’t cause a feed reader to access it for every post. Any good reader (or browser) will cache it. From the few reader hits I have had so far that seems to be the case.
With Blogger you have no choice, article footers is the only thing you can modify.
November 27th, 2005 at 3:13 am
Back in September plagiarismtoday.com suggested this method to combat the rampant automated plagiarism of splogs and other scaper sites. They also tell you how to do it for WordPress and MoveableType.
November 27th, 2005 at 9:41 am
Thanks Joe, that did the trick. I made a small alteration as well, and it seems to work just fine!