WordPressGarage.com

Social Proof: Increase subscribers to your blog by displaying your feed stats

Last night I attended MashBash Tel Aviv, an intimate gathering of Mashable’s Adam Hirsch and 800 of his closest friends from the Israeli hi-tech industry. In between having fun and getting served free drinks for three hours, I managed to learn something new. I learned about “social proof.”

Social what?

I met a guy at the event who I “knew” through twitter. Harry runs a snazzy new website about Jerusalem attractions and other stuff. We were discussing the right steps to take to increase blog traffic, and how he’s managed to get really decent traffic to his site in a relatively short period of time. He mentioned one tip that I had never heard before in all my blogging years, and it struck me as so simple yet so smart.

Social Proof.

Harry said that once you have at least 50 RSS subscribers, you should display the number of subscribers on your blog to encourage others to subscribe as well. The reason is that people like to try out things that lots of other people like. Think of a restaurant or cafe - if you’re walking down a street of cafes, would you rather go into the empty cafe, or the one overflowing with patrons? When lots of people patronize something, by showing up, subscribing, or in other ways, it encourages others to join as well.

(Harry learned this tip from Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Course, which actually sounds like it might be worth the investment from what he says.)

So take a look over to your right here. See that little feed reader thingy? As you can see, WordPress Garage has 781 subscribers. We’re a really cool crowd, having lots of fun. Doesn’t that make you want to subscribe too?

You can subscribe to the feed, or via email in the sidebar.

Posted in Tips | Tags: feeds, RSS | 2 Comments »

10 steps to a more splog-free WordPress blog

Last Thursday, I realized that this blog was being scraped. I’m sure it was being scraped before, but I never really wanted to spend time looking into it. A blog takes so much time to write and manage, that I didn’t want to add another task to my blogging plate.

But now that I have seen the sploggers in action, I realize how truly irritating and damaging sploggers are. But I guess that’s the case with all theft.

Anyways, I turned to you, my readers, to get your advice, and I got some amazing tips from the people that responded. I also did a little extra searching around, plus Darren Hoyt wrote a post with some good links in it, so here’s a summary of 10 ways to stop sploggers.

Part 1: 4 5 ways to find out if you’re being splogged

1. I found out about one of the scrapers via FeedBurner’s Uncommon Use feature. When you’re checking your feed stats in FeedBurner, make sure to keep an eye on the Uncommon Uses section to see if any sites you’re not familiar with are showing up. Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today also has a detailed post on this subject.
   
2. Use the Copyfeed WordPress plugin, or any other plugin that adds a footer to your feed, and add a link back to your site in the footer. This way, if a splogger publishes your complete posts on their site, you’ll get Incoming Link notices in your WordPress dashboard.
3. Lorelle has a bunch of steps and plugins that you can use to identify content theft.
4. Use the Digital Fingerprint WordPress plugin. This plugin places a customized digital fingerprint into blog posts, which is only visible in the feed:”Once embedded in your post, the plugin allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint using Google Blogsearch, BlogPulse, and Sphere…It also allows the quick and easy search for your digital fingerprint of the web itself using Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. An optional quick search can be included in the dashboard itself…Lastly, the plugin provides a few resources and links to places that will help you combat splog and spam should you find your content plagiarised or stolen on another website.”Talk about comprehensive!
5. Update Jan. 23, 2008: Joost de Valk explains five more ways that you can search around the web for your URL and feed URL to find instances where your blog is being scraped.
6. Update Feb. 24, 2008: Jacques left a comment here suggesting using Copyscape to track down sploggers.

Part 2: You’re being splogged? 10 ways to stop ‘em

1. Alyk says to contact the sploggers and ask them to stop. This may sound simple, but it’s a great way to start…as long as the sploggers have left their email addresses or a contact form on the site. In my case, they hadn’t.
2. Blaine, Jonathan and Jacob all suggested complaining to Google if the splogger is using Google Adwords to monetize the site. Jacob sent the following links:Easy: report them as spam to Google here:
   https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=enHarder: submit a dmca complaint to Google:
   http://www.google.com/dmca.html
3. Lorelle gives six steps that you can take to stop sploggers, such as how to contact them, and who to contact if they don’t respond. She also says what NOT to do.
4. Ryan pointed me to a thread on SitePoint where a guy’s whole site was being lifted, design, database and all. The guy comes up with a creative piece of code that appears on the copycat site insulting the current owner, but it’s not a perfect workaround. He explains how he found out about this:
   

   I just noticed that a few of the pages visited were mywords.info/… rather than teleclick.ca/… If the owner of MyWords hadn’t been stupid enough to keep my StatCounter code on his copy of the site, I might not have found out about it for months.
   The surest way to locate mirrors of your website, however, is simply to invest a few minutes a week Googleing selections of your own content and checking for ripoffs. You’ll likely find plenty of stolen content from your sites if they’re popular enough, and can ask the re-publishers to remove it, or give you proper credit, depending on your policy.

5. I checked one of my scrapers’ page source and noticed that they’re using FeedBurner to track their feeds, and scraping my FeedBurner feed (as opposed to the regular site feed). They’re also using Google Analytics to track site stats. I haven’t done this yet, but I plan on contacting FeedBurner and Google about this user. I’m guessing Google will have a particular interest in making sure that FeedBurner feeds aren’t being abused.
6. A few readers suggested filing DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notices with the host of the splogger, but aside from the fact that I suspect that this is about as effective as the paper it’s written on, it doesn’t apply to non-Americans. So if the splogger or splogee is not American, it seems this won’t apply.
7. Use the Copyfeed WordPress plugin (see step 1 under Part 1 above), or any other plugin that adds a footer to your feed. I use Copyfeed, since it allows you to do a whole bunch of useful things to your feed, but most important I have put a copyright notice in my feed footer with a link back to my site. This way, at the very least, if someone finds my content elsewhere on the web and they like it, they can easily find my site. Another similar plugin that does the same thing is Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer plugin. Joost’s plugin automatically adds a link back to the original post in the footer as well. (Hat tip to Glenn Dixon for that one.)
8. Some people suggest using the FeedEntryHeader WordPress plugin which adds a copyright statement and a link to the original article to the top of your feed entries. However, I’ve seen quite a few sites appear in Google Alerts where the excerpt from the post being cited is a header stating that if you’re reading this post off-site, it’s being scraped. But we want Google to scrape our sites and recommend it to others, and having that text appear in the Alert is not so user friendly.
9. The AntiLeech WordPress plugin is for those of us who don’t just want to stop sploggers, but want to get back at them as well. AntiLeech doesn’t prevent sploggers from accessing your site; “it produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and [his], too, ok?) and sends it only to them.”
10. Only publish a partial feed. This way, if your feed is scraped, readers who want to read the whole thing will be forced to click on the “Read More” link, and will be taken to your site. The drawback? Now your feed will be a partial feed. I know that I personally don’t have patience for partial feeds, and I don’t read them, since what’s the point of having a feed if you’re forcing me to visit your site? There’s a reason I’m using feeds, and it’s because I don’t have time and patience to open up every post in its own window. Since I feel this way, I really wouldn’t want to do that to my readers. And anyway, does everyone have to suffer because of a bunch of miserable, blood-sucking sploggers?

Even with all the steps above, I suspect that the sploggers will always retain the upper hand and we will never be able to completely stop them, or any of the other dark and sleazy types lurking on the web. If we could visualize the web, I bet the dark part takes up the majority of the web, and is probably growing faster too since it’s so much easier to crank out stolen or lowest-common-denominator content than good, useful, high-quality content.

Posted in Tips | Tags: bad guys, feeds, splogs | 11 Comments »

Importing RSS feeds as posts in WordPress, and managing your twitter, facebook, tumblr and WordPress lives in one fell swoop

I am constantly finding links that I think are not worth a whole post, but I would like to mention here anyways. So I wanted to find a quick and easy way to display short links that would become part of the blog stream, without causing clutter.

I also wanted to do this in a way that would make these links easily importable to other platforms besides WordPress, such as Twitter and in the facebook status. I figured the best way to do this would be to dedicate an RSS feed to these short bits of information. I considered using Twitter, but decided against it because it adds my Twitter name to the beginning of every feed. facebook’s status isn’t so easy to export. So I chose Tumblr.

I hadn’t visited Tumblr for a while, and was pleasantly surprised by the new additions to this already useful service. Tumblr is like Twitter in that it gives you a platform for sending out short bits of information, and they have added the option of following other Tumblr users, but the difference is that Tumblr allows you to post a wider range of types of content, such as photos, videos and audio, something Twitter doesn’t do. I guess people really like the bare-bones nature of Twitter, but I prefer Tumblr.

In any case, I got going with Tumblr and added a few posts. Then I had to find the right plugin or method for adding RSS feeds to this blog. I decided to go with WP-o-Matic.

WP-o-Matic is a bit tricky to set up, but it gives you a lot of features and options once you get it right. Here’s how you use it:

1. Download and upload the directory under wp-content/plugins. Activate.
2. You have to follow four steps to set it up, including choosing a name for the feed and giving it a slug. One of the steps is checking whether your server is compatible with Simple Pie. Just click on the link, and it will open up a new page that will either congratulate you for being compatible, or curse you. Just kidding, I don’t know what happens if you’re not compatible.
3. You will have to set up a cron job. I’ve never done that before, but the plugin author has made it really easy. You are given a line of code to use. Log in to your Control Panel, and under Advanced you will see an icon called Cron jobs. Click on that, and choose Standard. Paste your code snippet into the box called Command to run, and click on Save Crontab. That should do the job.
4. Go back to the WP-o-Matic setup and press Submit.
5. A new menu appears under your standard WordPress menu.
6. Once you’ve completed those four steps, you can set up your first “campaign.” This is how WP-o-Matic refers to any incoming RSS stream. So click on Add Campaign.
7. You have five tabs at the top of the campaign: Basic, Feeds, Categories, Rewrite, and Options. You need to click on each, fill them out, and only once you’ve completed that, click Submit.
8. Under the Basic tab, enter the Title of your Campaign. Check the box next to Active, and give it a slug if you like.
9. Under the Feeds tab, you can enter as many feeds as you like.
10. Under the Categories tab, select the category under which you want this Campaign to appear on your blog. If you want to create a new one, you can do it right there by clicking on Quick Add.
11. The Rewrite tab allows you to swap words in your feed, or link specific words to a website. I’m sure that’s handy, but I ignored it.
12. Under the Options tab, you can choose to use a custom post template, set the frequency for how often the feeds should be checked, select whether images will be cached on your server or hotlinked from the other server (choose cached if you want to be a good citizen), select whether to use the date of the original feed, or the date when the feed was imported, whether to perform pingbacks, whether the post should be published automatically or saved as Private or a Draft, the name of the author, and whether to allow comments or pings.
13. Click Submit.

That’s it. I think I may want to suppress this category from appearing on the blog home page, and have it only appear in its own section in the sidebar. I also think I’ll set the feed to automatically be saved as a draft so that I can add tags and other stuff to each tidbit for easier sorting and finding later.

Now I can use twitterfeed to have my Tumblr posts automatically published by my Twitter account. And the Twitter facebook app imports my tweets into my facebook status. Social media happiness! (Or ridiculousness, depending on how you look at it.)

I’d really like to hear what you think, and if you have any other ways for importing RSS feeds into your WordPress blog, whether as posts or in the sidebar. I suspect there is an easier way since sploggers are doing this kind of thing all the time.

Posted in Plugins | Tags: feeds, posts, RSS | 5 Comments »

RSS feed mashup services - easy and free

Once you’re writing and/or managing a bunch of sites or blogs, you may find that it would be useful to mash all your feeds together into one feed that displays posts from all of your sites in chronological order. For example, you may want to have each site display all the new posts from your other sites. Or, as in my case, I wanted to easily have all my new posts appear as Notes in facebook (yes, we’re back to facebook again).

Previously, I reviewed the different ways you can integrate your WordPress blog with facebook and vice versa. There are plugins that allow you to display every site in its own “box” on facebook, but that has a few disadvantages, namely it clutters your facebook profile, your “friends” may not receive notifications of any updates to those boxes (I’m not sure about this), and it means installing yet more plugins.

I explained how to get facebook Notes to display an RSS feed, but the disadvantage there is that you are limited to one feed. So I decided I would try to “mash” up all my feeds and create one monster feed that would create a new Note with every new post.

My criteria for a RSS feed mashing service were as follows:

• free (of course)
• pretty easy
• good results

Isn’t that what we’re always looking for?

Anyways, I did a quick search and tried out two services that met my criteria: KickRSS, and RSS Mixer. Here are the results:

Disadvantages to these mixed feeds:

• Can’t brand them with your own logos or colors.
• Can’t track the number of subscribers with FeedBurner since you can’t burn or redirect these feeds (at least not easily).
• It’s not a full-text feed - only excerpts.
• All images, videos, etc. - anything that is not pure text - is stripped.

You may ask - why didn’t you use sleek and simple Yahoo Pipes? Well, I ain’t no tech-dummy, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where to put what and how to put it in Yahoo Pipes. Pipes is simple for nuclear physicists and Linux users, and I am neither.

I tried importing both feeds in facebook, and the results were the same so I decided to go with KickRSS for no good reason whatsoever. If it stops working, I’ll let you know, but in the meantime, all my facebook friends can now enjoy every single new post added to all of my sites - lucky them!

Posted in Tips | Tags: feeds, RSS | 4 Comments »

Adding comments, related posts and copyright notice to RSS feed

I’ve seen people mention that a good way to prevent feed scrapers from doing so is by adding a copyright to the feed, but I never really understood why that would help.

But then I met someone who was building up his community site, and he asked if he could publish the feed of one of my sites on his site. I said fine, since I didn’t really see any difference between someone reading my feed there or in their feed reader. However, it made me uncomfortable that he would be getting good material (well, hopefully it’s good) with little to no effort.

So I decided to try to make this work to my advantage as much as possible by extending my feed with additives that I hoped would gain exposure for my site, and even drive feed readers there.

To do so, i used the WP - ©Feed plugin. Upload and activate, and then go to Options > ©Feed. The options there are a little confusing, since it’s translated from German and the English isn’t always so clear, so I had to play around with a it a bit. Here’s how I got it to work the way I wanted:

1. In the Start of copyright notice field, enter whatever it is that you want to appear at the end of every post feed. This could be more than just a copyright notice - it could also be a call to action, an ad, etc. I put in code like this:<hr /><small>Copyright © 2007 <a href="http://mysite.com">MySite.</a><br />Did you like this post? Visit <a href="http://mysite.com">MySite</a> for more like it!
2. digital fingerprint - I have no idea what this is for, so I left it blank.
3. End of copyright notice: I entered the following code:
   </small>
4. Then you have four options, which I left unchecked.
5. Whitelist: again, no idea what this is for, so I left it blank.
6. Blacklist: ditto.
7. Select Comments in feed to have any comments appear at the end of the post.
8. Before the comments - I put in this code:
   <hr /><h2>Comments</h2><ul>
9. Layout of the comments:
   <li><a href="%permalink%">%date%</a>, %authorlink% Commenter: %comment%</li>
10. After the comments:
    </ul>
11. If you use the Simple Tagging plugin, as I do, leave “Insert similar content in feed?” unchecked. If you don’t use Simple Tagging, select this option.
12. Number of items with similar content - enter how many related items you want to appear. I entered 5.
13. Identify posts with password - I left this unchecked.
14. Add abstract of posts - I left this unchecked, since I have a full-text feed, and this didn’t sound like something I want.
15. Number of words - I think this is not relevant if you don’t select Add abstract of posts in step 14.
16. Before items with similar content:
    <hr /><h2>Related Posts:</h2><ul>
17. Before the titles of items with similar content:
    <li>
18. After the titles of items with similar content:
    </li>
19. After the items with similar content:
    </ul>
20. Simple Tagging Related Post in feed? - select this if you use the Simple Tagging plugin.
21. Full text feed? I left this unchecked, since I use a plugin that ensures a full text feed, even when I use the <!--more--> tag. But I guess I could theoretically deactivate the plugin and just check this option.
22. I skipped the rest of the options since I don’t know what they’re for, and clicked on Update Options.

That’s it! Now I have a beautiful feed that works hard for me wherever it may go!

©Feed»

Posted in Plugins | Tags: feeds, RSS | 1 Comment »

Fetching and displaying RSS feeds on your site

I’ve been looking high and low for a simple and working solution for displaying a feed in my site. If your site is widget-enabled, you can easily display another feed with the RSS widget. But if you are not widget-enabled, or you want to put your feed somewhere else, you are stuck.  I tried a whole bunch of plugins, and finally ended up using FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost feature (under the Publicize tab when you are logged in), which is nice but puts a little “Headlines by FeedBurner” tagline at the bottom, which you might not want to appear in the middle of your page.

And then a revelation - Blue Anvil explains how WordPress has RSS fetching capabilities built in. You can call an RSS feed with one of two functions:

1. fetch_rss
2. wp_rss

See Blue Anvil’s explanation of how these functions work>>
See the WordPress codex entries on wp_rss and fetch rss>>

Posted in Tips | Tags: FeedBurner, feeds, RSS | No Comments »

Aizatto’s Related Posts Plugin

Most WordPress users are familiar with the WASABI Related Entries plugin. I’ve never used it because it involves messing around with the database tables. Instead, I have been using the Simple Tagging feature of displaying related posts based on tags used in the posts.

I recently discovered a new related posts plugin which seems easier to use, and I plan to try it out in one of my next sites - Aizatto’s Related Posts Plugin. WordPress by Examples gives a detailed description (more detailed than on the plugin developer’s site) of this plugin’s features:

• No messing with database tables: this plugin does the database stuff automatically
• You don’t have to modify your template files - the related posts appear at the end of every post.
• The related posts also appear in the RSS feed - that is pretty cool!
• You can customize the appearance of the related posts.

Aizatto’s Related Posts Plugin>>

Posted in Plugins | Tags: feeds, posts, RSS, template tags | 2 Comments »

Another way to add RSS feeds to your WordPress blog

Shaolin Tiger explains how to use the WordPress Feedlist Plugin to display RSS feeds from other sites on your blog.

How to use RSS Feeds on your Wordpress Site>>

Posted in Plugins | Tags: feeds, RSS | No Comments »

Replace WordPress default dashboard with custom feeds

I never really look at the main page of my WordPress admin section. It is full of all sorts of stuff that I didn’t ask to see, so I just ignore it. But why not put information there that you are interested in, or that helps you with your blogging?

Previously I posted about the WordPress Dashboard Editor: a plugin that allows you to add whatever you want to the Dashboard through PHP and HTML. KQF is another plugin that allows you replace the dashboard with custom feeds that you specify. You can also customize the look and behavior of feeds, and has a polling feature that will check for feed freshness at predetermined intervals.

I have just one question: why is this plugin called KQF?

KQF>> 

Posted in Plugins | Tags: admin, dashboard, feeds, RSS | 4 Comments »

Share your Shared items from Google Reader in your blog

A little while ago one of the commenters here asked if I knew how to display shared items from Google Reader in a blog, such as in the sidebar. David Paul Robinson explains how to put a “clip” on your blog that contains your shared items. You could probably also use one of WordPress’ feed widgets or plugins to display your Shared items RSS feed on  your site.
Using Google Reader For Your Link Blog>>

Posted in Tips | Tags: feeds, RSS, widgets | No Comments »