RSS Feed Changes
Due to massive use and abuse of the ErosBlog RSS feed by robot-aggregated spam blogs that don’t properly credit the source of articles from this blog, I’ve made some changes to the RSS feed. If you’re using a feedreader with the full-text feed, ErosBlog just got spammier for you. My sincere apologies.
If the recent changes actually broke things in your feed reader — very possible, considering that I edited the RSS template without knowing all I should about it — please let me know. Specific details will be most useful — the name and version of your reader, the nature of the brokenness, even (if you’re the sort of techie to whom it’s blindingly obvious) the changes I would need to make in the feed to make it work again (because it won’t be blindingly obvious to me).
Thanks!
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=1732
it worked fine from google personalized homepage
LiveJournal syndication:
http://syndicat....html
If I’m reading the error correctly, there’s a ‘;’ in one of the img tags, and that’s confusing LJ’s parser.
Thank you! I had discovered that some feeders were choking on that image tag, but not why. I think it’s fixed now.
Rolled over fine in my Bloglines RSS
Looks OK on Bloglines on Netscape 7.1, if that helps at all.
Would it be greedy to ask how you know that those robot blogs are stealing your feed?
Adele, not exactly stealing, since the very purpose of an RSS feed is to allow for syndication (automated republication) of your feed items elsewhere. In the blogging world, most folks who put together syndication sites (also called aggregators) set them up so that, for instance, the post title links back to the permalink for the post on its original blog. And they typically make it very easy to see where a post came from, and click through to the original blog. This sort of syndication is a *good* thing.
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.
*nod* Right, that makes sense. Thank you!
Hey, is each post supposed to have those three pictures at the end? If so — cool. If not, in my bloglines feed, all of your posts have the same three photos at the end.
Yeah, that’s the spammy part — are the pictures functioning as imagelinks?
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.
Yes, they still have their image links. It doesn’t look like a banner though — no box — just looks like three random explicit photos at the end of each post ;) That’s why I thought it might have been a mistake — my bad. Carry on ;)
I read erosblog through LJ syndication, and the extra images mean I’m likely to drop it. I sometimes read my LJ feed at work (naughty, but usually I can zip past any inline images, and I’m more interested in what you have to say than the photos anyway).
Any chance you could make the images smaller?
I have been importing Eros Blog content into my private adult club (with full attribution), because it was interesting and not full of commerical cruft like most of the other adult feeds. (My site is not accessible by search engines). Most of these other adult sites don’t actually provide content in the feeds – just an image or two with an article title and a link back to the site – which makes them useless for anything but a picture gallery. Since the changes, your feed still occasionally has interesting content (a plus) but now shows the same three spammy pictures over and over (a big minus). This has made it annoying, and therefore less interesting. So it looks like I’ll have to drop this feed , which is too bad because it really was interesting before. I think it would still have some value if you could just randomize the spam images from a larger pool of pictures. Then it would still serve your purposes and not be so annoying.
Hannah, I’ll be sorry to lose you, but making ErosBlog available in a “work safe” (oh, how I hate that phrase: your work is not safe) fashion has never been on my list of priorites. The images are the same size as my ads here on the blog, and it was never my intent to provide an ad-free feed, I just hadn’t taken the time to learn how to alter the feed.
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.
We all have to pay the bills. I don’t care if the content contains advertising. I’m only suggesting that ad rotation would make it less obnoxious; which would make said advertising more effective. Seeing the same image over and over might work for kid’s toys or trademarks, but for adult content an ad campaign needs to be fresh and constantly changing. I’m more than happy to send you customers – but help me out here.
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.