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In order to offer a choice in offered feeds through WordPress, I have made some very slight modifications to the wp-rss2.php file and in the options inside WordPress to make that possible.
Setup your feed option (under options->reading->syndication feeds->full text) to show full text as the default feed for your blog. This way, the feeds are more complete and links are not disguised etc. Now you can download wp-rss2e.phps (rename it to wp-rss2e.php) and put it in the root of your blog. Once there, just create a link called “Excerpted feed” somewhere in the sidebar to link to that file (or anywhere else really, just not within the loop) in order to allow people to subscribe to the excerpted feed.
You can also add it to the <head> section of index.php as well if you choose, but this is not necessary. If you want the default to be an excerpted feed, this process will not work for you.
A tip of the hat for IoZBlog for squishing an annoying bug in WordPress version 1.2 Mingus. Simply moving two lines of code is all it takes, and you can read all about it at I0Zblog.
Thanks for contributing this!
I understand that a lot of sites are offering “blogging news” and are trying to gain popularity by capitulating in this niche market. Since I tend to keep track of a handful of blogging tools, I tend to find a lot of blogs that are blatantly copying the articles from another blog and passing them off as their own. Some of these blogs are adding attribution, but that is not enough.
Let me elaborate a little. I come from a very strict educational background where any sort of plageurism is looked down upon with extreme disgust. Now that might not apply to the blogging world, but I still consider blatant disregard for intellectual property to be a major problem. In academia, usage of material from external sources is encouraged. There are however, very strict rules of identification of sources and proper punctuation of external information so as to designate their origin and provide the required attribution. Though these very strict rules cannot be adhered upon in the fragmented blogging world, nominal rules of respect for Intellectual property still applies.
I encourage bloggers to use external sources. I strongly encourage discussion of these bits of information in personal blogs. However, please do not copy every word and every punctuation from another blog and call it your own. Providing a “source” or a link to the original author is simply not enough when you are copying the whole article. If you are going to post the exact information from another blog to your own, make sure that the external information is blockquoted or somehow designated to not be your own. Readers are not stupid and they will catch on. Providing unoriginal content can only go so far.
I have identified a couple of blogs that are completely made up of posts from other blogs. Most of these are the new fangled “blogging news blogs”. This has irked me to the point that if these people do not stop, I will take it upon myself to maintain a list of these blogs and prevent their access to this site and any other that I might have influence in. I will go so far as to suggest that my readers do the same.
Please respect other people’s intellectual property. You are very welcome to provide parts of posts as text in your entries with simple attribution. You are even welcome to quote large parts of posts as long as they are designated as being completely from another blog or website. But please do not steal the work of others and do not think that a small source identification is enough to make a whole article your own work. I hope other authors feel the same way!
I hate excerpted RSS feeds. I inadvertently (through mostly my own doing) will subscribe to the excerpted feed rather than the encoded version and I will curse myself through the process of reading the news of these blogs.
Imagine reading through Shakespeare without any punctuation. RSS, in my opinion, is already a pretty bland way to gather information and takes away from the experience of reading a blog. However (boy I like that word!) reading through, and making sense of articles that are devoid of any sort of indication of the content, is very confusing. Case in point. I was reading Jeremy’s feed this morning. Zawodny had written about RSS searches and Joseph Scott’s recent views on the lack of good RSS search engines (which I had already read and commented on previously). However, without any links or any blockquotes being highlighted, this is what I read as the article on Jeremy’s blog:
The current state of “feed search” is messy at best. Joseph Scott does a good job of presenting his impressions on the major feed search engines (where “feed” means RSS/Atom) Say I wanted to track what people are saying about PostgreSQL. This can’t really be done with the traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) because they base their results on popularity (in one form or another). This doesn’t help me because I’m interested in what people are saying right now,…
Huh? Was I not paying attention? Did I goof off at goofing off??
Now, for the non-lazy, this is trivial. It does not bother me as much as I like to whine about it. However, a subscription to the full, encoded feed, would have prevented the confusion and aggravation, however nominal it is in my case. So here is my suggestion.
If the default feed for your blog is excerpted (by choice or otherwise), please think about modifying it to make it the full RSS feed and make the excerpt an option. The experience of reading your blog becomes that much more pleasurable and pleasure == return visitors == ensuring your blog’s popularity. If you are worried that people will click through lesser if they get all the information from feed readers, I would respond that that is an unfounded fear. People visit blogs personally even if they get their daily news fix from a feed reader. I know that I do just that and the traffic to this blog also attests to that fact. (Of course, none of this applies to or is directed towards, Jeremy)
geek ramblings >> Spammer Tar Pit: I like to call this the “PissOff” plugin. Dougal and I were discussing this yesterday while our respective weblogs were getting flooded with comments and he has come up with a really nice solution. This one stops flood spammers in their tracks. This plugin, used in conjunction with Kitten’s Spam Words will not only keep Spam from showing up on your blog, but will also prevent spam from even showing up on your moderation list.
Basically, Dougal’s plugin uses a powerful regex (regular expressions) to check the referer IPs of people accessing your blog. The list he uses is derived from your own blog by matching the IP format against the list of moderation keys that have been added to your blog. If anyone from the moderated IPs tries to access anything, they are bogged down for a minute and then send the “Access denied” message. I personally liked the “piss off spammer” message he had setup before.
Dougal had written something similar earlier yesterday and we came up with some further modifications, but the moderation keys along with the referer comparison really makes a difference. I can tell you for sure that this works and works well (for now). I will be adding a further few tweaks when I get a chance (moderation by the superglobal $_POST).
Thanks Dougal!
Mark Ghosh 
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