FYI, many feed readers are forced to strip formatting data because of the many ways it can be used to launch XSS attacks. The best ways around this is to provide the formatting cues as completely as possible with HTML tags and not with ‘parameters’. Most style= parameters in particular are stripped for security reasons.

Hope this helps.

Mike, same deal - if you were using my feed *because* it was free of advertising, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. ErosBlog is advertising-supported, though I try hard to make the ads unobtrusive and attractive.

Now, that said, I’m *not* happy with the way feed readers that ignore formatting data are presenting the current ads. Making them smaller, getting smarter about figuring out a presentation that works, figuring out how to rotate the ads as I do on the blog — all of these things are possible. I do plan on implementing improvements, and I appreciate the feedback toward that goal.

Any chance you could make the images smaller?

In readers which preserve formatting info, those three pictures appear in a banner-like advertising box. (It’s like that in FeedReader, for instance.) In readers which strip formatting info, the box goes away, but the pictures — and, in the examples I’ve seen, their associated imagelinks — remain.

I know that seeing advertising in the feeds can be annoying, so I tried to make it as least as tasteful as the advertising here that folks reading the feed normally don’t see. But I especially wanted to get my ads plastered on the web pages of the folks who are aggregating my feed with other feeds and not giving adequate link credits.

What the robot spammers do is very similar, only they try to hide or obscure the source of the blog posts. Usually they don’t strip the source information completely, but they’ll give a source link that’s small and hard to find, so that the reader doesn’t know where the post came from. And their goal is very different — they are trying to use the blog posts as search engine fodder, typically, to suck in search engine visitors and feed them off to their advertising. Rather than trying to assemble a bunch of good feeds into a “sum is more than the whole of its parts” collection, they are just harvesting keyword-rich human-written text and jumbling it up so it looks to Googlebot like they have an original website.

To answer your question, since they do usually leave a tiny link somewhere, I usually find them by looking at my server logs. Or they show up in Technorati. And sometimes I just stumble over them while doing searches; I do a lot of blog searches in an effort to find new blogs.

Would it be greedy to ask how you know that those robot blogs are stealing your feed?