WordPress Plugin Review

No Self Pings by blogwaffe

I learned about this WordPress plugin about a month ago. I didn’t really pay attention to this plugin until self-ping comments are stacking up on my dashboard. I seek out for this plugin again and installed it.

It’s very useful plugin if you don’t want your WP to ping your own blog. Some people love to ping-myself all the way stuff.

This plugin is very easy to install, use and no maintenance required. Excellent plugin that does the job perfectly as described.

Don’t forget to checkout blogwaffe’s other interesting posts while you’re there.

We all want publicity. We submit our site to Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. We ask readers to subscribe full, snippet or e-mail newsletters. Our nice WordPress automatically ping search engines whenever our blogs are updated. We even let anyone to comment on our blogs. We let search engines to index every single word and link. Why? Because we want them back and back for more.

Now the trouble comes in. You provided a feed or syndication RSS on your blog, found out that your posts are popping up on other people’s blogs everywhere. Basically they syndicated or republished your posts.

Did they violated your rights? Is it illegal? Why didn’t they ask for permission? Well, true answer lies between whether you provided a web syndication or not.

Here’s the quote from Wikipedia:

“Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; however, in general, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website’s recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts). ”

Here’s the LiveJournal’s take syndication on LiveJournal through a feed. Question FAQ #155

“My content is being syndicated onto LiveJournal and I don’t want it there. What can I do?

You must first take server-side action to block the content from being syndicated to a LiveJournal account. For instance, if the syndicated account on LiveJournal is using your site’s RSS or Atom feed, you could either disable that feed or block LiveJournal’s IP address (204.9.177.18) from accessing your server. Either will prevent your content from being syndicated onto LiveJournal.

Syndicated accounts retain entries for two weeks to allow LiveJournal users time to view them; after that period, the entries are automatically deleted. Content may continue to be visible on the syndicated account after you have disabled access to the feed, but there is no way to accelerate the automatic deletion process.

LiveJournal will not take action if the syndicated account is using a feed provided by your site. However, if you are unable to disable the feed or block LiveJournal’s IP address, you should contact the LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team for further assistance. Similarly, if your site does not offer a RSS or Atom feed, but the content is being “screenscraped” and syndicated onto LiveJournal, please file a report with the Abuse Prevention Team.”

Basically LiveJournal will republish your feed if you provide a feed on your site. Do you use FeedBurner? Read FeedBurner’s terms of use before use its services.

Here’s how to protect your contents or add copyright disclosure to your RSS feeds. If you’re using WordPress, you can get a plugin from wordpress to add or embed copyrights so that you can trackdown who’s violating your rights. The plugin is called Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter. You can read his post on how to protect your RSS feed.

My final answer to the question?

Don’t be afraid to syndicate your full post or half feed. In long term, you’ll win. Go ahead let them republish your posts. You’ll get free advertisement. Usually the syndicating side benefits more than republishing side. Because many people, including me want to get to the source of the story.

Here’s the quote from Wikipedia:

“Syndication benefits both the websites providing information and the websites displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication drives exposure across numerous online platforms. This generates new traffic for the transmitting site — making syndication a free and easy form of advertisement.”

Happy Syndication~!!!

How to protect your RSS feed from 3rd party.

Last night, I was wandering around on the internet and found a post title that caught my attention. “Robocoop ignores copyright” I’d like to share this post and comments.

First of all, I have to agree 100% with Brian E. & B. I believe that they’re same person.

Brian E Says:
August 17th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Hi Ann, I read your blog on 43people and/or on google.com/ig. I’m not quite sure why you publish an RSS feed if you don’t want other sites to aggregate it. Some subscription feeds require a unique key in order to access them.For web aggregatiors, in which you can add any RSS feed, it would seem to be impossible for the site owners to read the copyrights the feeds they receive. In the case of your feed, there is not copyright in it. Google and every other search engine will index your site, and sell ads on their website, unless your robots.txt file forbids them from doing this.FWIW, 43people doesn’t have ads on your syndicated page, and there is no reference to a copyright inside your RSS feed. People who want to read and/or leave comments are going to come to your site anyway.If you simply don’t include the rss link in your site, most people are not going to know it exists.

B Says:
August 21st, 2006 at 8:13 pm
*ahem*
http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing Feeds
http://www.feedburner.com
Syndicate what you don’t mind people republishing, don’t syndicate what you don’t want them to republish. Embed a link to your site in every feed post if you want. Embed your whole damn copyright if you want. Syndicate only the first 5 words if that’s all you can part with.The power’s in your hands, huntress. Your time might be better spent learning how to control the situation instead of conspiring to bring down those who take advantage of your carelessness. They are merely syndicating your syndication feed, after all.

Brian E & B have excellent point. I fully understand that Spamhuntress doesn’t like other people republish her feeds. But they’re not doing anything wrong including LiveJournal, Technorati, and others. She should have attached copyright to all her posts before syndicate or provide RSS feed.

Here’s how to protect your contents or add copyright disclosure to your RSS feeds. If you’re using WordPress, you can get a plugin from wordpress to add or embed copyrights so that you can trackdown who’s violating your rights. The plugin is called Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter. You can read his post on how to protect your RSS feed.

True, I was reading Spamhuntress because of her RSS feed through Atom. If she provided a feed that only display titles like she mentioned in her Copyright disclosure I wouldn’t be there. She didn’t even define the splogs either.

I hope she feels little better because I just became Spamhuntress’s another regular reader.

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Troubleshooting trackbacks & pingbacks.

I can’t receive trackbacks & pings

1. Check Allow Comments & Allow Pings on Discussion

2. Check your Discussion Panel in your administration menu.

3. Check Comments Panel in administration menu.

I can’t send trackbacks.

1. Double check trackback URL.

2. Check Pingback confirmation.

3. The receiving site may choose not to show your comments or held for moderation.

4. Maybe you’re on the receiving site’s spam or blocked list.

I having technical difficulty with WordPress.

Post your issues on WordPress Support Forum.

Practice and test your trackback and pingbacks at Trackback Tester Blog.