Tag: RSS

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Google Reader in Plain English

The folks at CommonCraft have done it again. This time, they have made a quick video about one of my favorite tools for reading information on the web, Google Reader. I’ll let them explain it to you.

I currently have 253 subscriptions in Google Reader. I can’t say that I read each and everything that passes through, but there are certain RSS feeds that I do pay closer attention to than others.

Do you ever open up a newspaper and scan the headlines? Then perhaps you read the byline to get a little more behind the story, and only then do you decide to actually read the rest of it. There are many times when I use it in that capacity, especially when it comes to various feeds from news organizations that crank out a lot of items in just a few hours.

This is how I keep on top of things, even if it’s just a quick glance.

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Adjusting and fixing my RSS feeds

There is a good chance that RSS subscribers just got blasted with a back log of posts, so please don’t think that I made about ten posts in a single day. I did some rearranging a couple of months ago when I re-themed my site, restructured my WordPress install, and upgraded to the latest and greatest version of 2.5.

I neglected to make adjustments to FeedBurner, and that has been fixed. Let that be a mental note to the rest of you with similar setups. If you make significant, back end changes to your WordPress site, don’t forget to double check you RSS feed if you are using a third party site like FeedBurner.

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Cool WordPress plugin: FeedEntryHeader

Feed Sample 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.