If you are a subscriber to my blog in Google Reader (or another reader) or an email subscriber, you will have noticed that a few days ago, I changed my feed to truncated, meaning that I’m showing part of my blog post, but not the entire post in my feed reader.
And you may have noticed all the hubbub in blogland the last week, as many bloggers that I personally know are also truncating their feeds for the same reasons.
I’ll tell you why I’ve decided to do it. It seems that the blogging landscape has changed a LOT in the last couple of years and now there are sites, called scraper sites, that go around blogland stealing feeds from blogs and publishing them as their own content and they are making money off of this stolen content.
Many of my blog friends and I have decided to take action against this practice and at least to slow it down, by not offering our full feed out there so that these scraper sites can just set up software to steal our content as soon as it is published.
My friend, Susan, at Between Naps on the Porch, has written a great article about blog scrapers and how it all works, so if you want more info, please read it there.
Susan also has found that if you read in Google Chrome, there is a feature you can download, Google Reader Inline, that once you load it on Chrome, you can click on the magnifying glass when reading a feed and it will bring up the entire feed, so this may be one way for you to still read in your reader and see the whole post. Susan explains that in this post.
I do realize that this may be a hardship for some of you reading. It will take a few extra seconds to click over to read the post. I do know that and I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. It’s not my intention to make things hard for my readers, but to protect ourselves from thievery, this seems to be the best thing to do at this time. Some bloggers have had more content stolen than others. This has been going on a long time and I’ve seen my posts stolen before, but now it seems to be a whole feed that is stolen and used. And that’s really not fair to all of us who take a lot of time with our blogs and work hard on our content, only to have it stolen word for word and posted on a scraper feature site. These sites are garnering lots of traffic even, but their practices are not ethical at all.
I’m going to monitor the feed situation and I am hoping that most of you will not unsubscribe, but will continue to follow my blog. I hate to lose any of you, but I know it will probably happen! I really do hate to do this, but we don’t want our content stolen either and this will at least help deter that. I’ve also added a note at the end of my posts as to where my content originates. Hopefully, these 2 measures will help keep my content from being used elsewhere.
If I find that this truncated feed is not working all that well, I may consider switching it back later. I’m going to give it a try for now and see how it works, so thanks for hanging with me!
I’m still trying to get it all figured out, so it may go back and forth for a few days until I can get the correct excerpts working on the feed and my blog. I want to show a paragraph and a picture on my feed, so then you can decide if you want to click over and read the whole post. I’m still tweaking that part and am working with plugins to make this happen and so far, I haven’t gotten it all worked out yet . You may see the whole feed up there right now, but just know that I plan to truncate very soon, but want to at least make it look good with a picture for all my readers!
Thank you ALL so much for following along on my journey all this time. I truly do appreciate each and every one of you out there who take the time to read and stop by and leave comments. It means the world to me.
I do hope you understand all of this and will stick with me! Thanks for the positive comments I’ve seen already and for the ones of you who aren’t happy about it, I’m sincerely sorry, but feel this is a business decision for all of us to make who do this blogging for a business.
I am not a current follower of your blog so take my opinion for what it’s worth. I followed a blogroll link to your site and happened to notice this particular post. I occasionally search out new blogs to follow by doing this and add them to my reader if I like the subject matter covered.
I primarily read blogs on my iPhone using a reader feed called Newsify that pulls from my Google Reader account as the Google Reader app for the iPhone is not very good. That being said I read most of my feeds at various times throughout the day when I have a spare moment. Frequently I am working within 3G and not wi-fi and truncated feeds are not worth the effort. The time it takes me to sync ALL of my feeds into my reader is much less than the time it takes me to click over to one post from a truncated feed. I follow over a hundred blogs and simply do not have the time and will delete blogs that switch from a full feed.
While I understand the need to protect your hard work I thought I would share the reason why I delete or refuse to follow truncated feeds since many of the replies you’ve had seem not to understand someone’s motivation behind it. It’s nothing personal, it’s simply a matter of time and ease of following.
This makes me so sad. I have read every post from your blog for years. I think this is the first blog I started reading regularly. I do all my reading through my Reeder app (synced with google reader). As a new mom I hardly have time to keep up with my favorite blogs and don’t have time to click over from reeder to read each post individually. I’ll miss seeing all the house renovations. 🙁
I was wondering why bloggers do this. All of us are busy, busy, busy so with the limited time we have to enjoy reading blogs, it is very frustrating to me to come across a blog that truncates a post. Instead of going directly to the site to read the full post, I move on to other blogs that don’t truncate. I totally understand your reasons for doing this, but then again all industries are dealing with similar situations (music industry a case in point) so I think you are going to have to figure out if it’s worth it. Sometimes I think bloggers are too protective of their posts. I oftentimes see DIY projects that a blogger will claim as their own and yet I did the same crafty things with my kids 20 years ago and I’m sure people did them decades before that.
Please unsubscribe this e-mail.. I’ve registered my new e-mail. Tks M
HI, Marilyn, you can unsubscribe yourself, that’s not something I can do. Just click the unsubscribe button on the bottom of your old email that you don’t want to use anymore. Thanks!