I got an email from someone who subscribes to my RSS[wiki] feed that noticed something new in their subscription lately, and you might have as well.

The image here is a snippet of how a post of mine looks in Google Reader. Basically, it’s a simple plugin that provides a copyright stamp at the beginning of every post that goes into your RSS feed. There are a few variations of how you can do this with WordPress, but the one I am using is FeedEntryHeader. It puts a copyright, a link to your site, and a link to the original post at the start of all your posts.

Why would you want to do this? Well the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of aggregator sites that like to take the content from your RSS feeds and put them up on their sites as original content. Better yet, there are some sites that will completely credit you for your content but strip away all the embedded links. This plugin at least puts all this information at the top where it’s slightly hard to miss. At the very least, the URL to your original content will show up on those sites that “borrow” your content.

If you use WordPress and care about the things you publish, you should look at using this plugin. It’s more than just getting credit for what you publish. There is also something to be said about other people making money off of the content you generate, and that’s just inconsiderate.