Blog RSS Feeds

[Dave Graybeal]

I'm a huge fan of all the work that everyone puts into their blogs. First I'd like to say thanks for that. There are a lot of great articles out there. My question is in reference to the way the RSS feeds for a lot of these blogs show up in my RSS Reader. For Example, If I look at the LAVA RSS Feed I see the actual website embeded into the RSS Reader for me to view. I've seen a few of the blogs lately that just post text summaries for the RSS (not as nice to look at as the original html page), and even others (Expressionflow) that only show 2 lines of text and then directs you to the webpage for more. Is this an option on the Blog creators side that they get to decide how their blog is viewed? Or is this an option thru my reader that is Blog Specific?

Thanks,

Dave Graybeal

[Tomi Maila]

Hi Dave,

Thank you for raising up this question. I'm the owner of the blog site expressionflow. The blog owener determines what is included in the RSS feed. RSS feeds can be used either to distribute all the blog entries or to distribute summaries together with a link to the blog. Following blogs directly from an RSS feeder definitely is a nice way to go from the user's point of view. However from the blog owners point of view there are several problems related to distributing the content of the blog complitely as an RSS feed.

First issue is the question of copyrights. When publishing the whole content of a blog as an RSS feed, the copyrights of the content is very hard to control. The internet is full of websites that rehost the content of blog RSS feeds on their site. As a result the copyright notices that are present in the original site are not present on these other sites. If the blog owner does want to determine the copyrights related to the blog, then full RSS feeds are not an option. This is the case with expressionflow. I want to be able to use material on the site that cannot be freely distributable. This is for the benefit of the blog readers as I can introduce issues that I would not be able to introduce should the content be complitely free of copyrights.

Another issue is related to funding the blog hosting. Hosting a blog is not complitely free. For example hosting expressionflow is a professional hobby for me. I'd like to cover at least some of the expenses that hosting costs me. You may have noticed that I've some ads on the site. These ads are there so that I can cover my expenses from the blog so that I'm able to host the blog.

I undestand that limiting the content of the RSS feed may be annoying. However hosting the blog on website only and using RSS as a method to inform users that there is new content on the blog allows maintaining better quality blogs. I hope you understand this issue and will not stop reading expressionflow for this annoyance.

Best regards,

Tomi Maila

Expressionflow blogger

[Dave Graybeal]

Tomi,

I do infact understand what your saying. It is important to maintain your copyright information, and I think anyone viewing your blogs should be willing to view the advertisements to support the cost of hosting. Is there another option though? When I view the Lava RSS in my RSS Reader (Thunderbird) it appears just like the webpage that I would have clicked on. I would imagine that this would count as a hit on the website being viewed and that It would also show any advertisements that exist there. ThinkingInG is another Example of a blog that displays the actual page. I would think this would solve the issue of advertisements not being viewed. I'm not sure however if this solves the rehosting issue you mentioned. I do enjoy your blogs and don't mind going to the site, I was just wondering if there is a way to get the best of both worlds ( you get the credit for people viewing them and we get to view them in our environment of choice). I'm curious if what Michael Aivaliotis and Jim Kring are doing solves these issues.

Dave Graybeal

[Jim Kring]

QUOTE(Dave Graybeal @ Apr 4 2007, 07:33 AM)

Tomi,

I do infact understand what your saying. It is important to maintain your copyright information, and I think anyone viewing your blogs should be willing to view the advertisements to support the cost of hosting. Is there another option though? When I view the Lava RSS in my RSS Reader (Thunderbird) it appears just like the webpage that I would have clicked on. I would imagine that this would count as a hit on the website being viewed and that It would also show any advertisements that exist there. ThinkingInG is another Example of a blog that displays the actual page. I would think this would solve the issue of advertisements not being viewed. I'm not sure however if this solves the rehosting issue you mentioned. I do enjoy your blogs and don't mind going to the site, I was just wondering if there is a way to get the best of both worlds ( you get the credit for people viewing them and we get to view them in our environment of choice). I'm curious if what Michael Aivaliotis and Jim Kring are doing solves these issues.

Dave Graybeal

Dave,

Tomi and I use the same software for our blog sites, but there appears to be some difference in the settings or version of our software. We're looking into solving this problem, so that you can see the actual web page when viewing http://EXPRESSIONFLOW.com' target="_blank">EXPRESSIONFLOW in Thunderbird.

Thanks,

-Jim

[Tomi Maila]

Jim is right. I try to figure out if I can make my whole web page visible in the RSS feed including all the ad scripts.

Tomi

[Dave Graybeal]

Sweet,

I'm glad it sounds like there might be a best of both worlds solution

Thanks,

Dave

[Tomi Maila]

First the good news, I managed to change my blog so that the RSS feed is displayed as a web page in thunderbird. Then the bad news. It seems that my google ad scripts are not running at thunderbird. I'd like to as you LAVA users who follow my feed to tell if your RSS feed reader displays the ads on my feed or not. The feed address is below.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Expressionflow

Tomi

[TG]

If I may add a comment here as well.

You may have heard this from others already.

I am unable to see many RSS feed articles from my workplace PC

because of IT filter settings for which I have no control.

I don't pretend to understand the terminology of RSS feed as compared to an ordinary web page.

I only wanted to point out that some of the links posted here for perfectly legitimate purposes are somehow interpreted as personal pages or entertainment and are thus banned from being seen (I presume in many workplaces that practice high security IT or corprate policy).

If one is posted is there a way to put an alternate link that simulates a standard web page?

QUOTE(John Rouse @ Apr 5 2007, 12:45 PM)

If I may add a comment here as well.

You may have heard this from others already.

I am unable to see many RSS feed articles from my workplace PC

because of IT filter settings for which I have no control.

I don't pretend to understand the terminology of RSS feed as compared to an ordinary web page.

I only wanted to point out that some of the links posted here for perfectly legitimate purposes are somehow interpreted as personal pages or entertainment and are thus banned from being seen (I presume in many workplaces that practice high security IT or corprate policy).

If one is posted is there a way to put an alternate link that simulates a standard web page?

example

http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=5414QUOTE(John Rouse @ Apr 5 2007, 12:53 PM)

<BR>If I may add a comment here as well.<BR><BR>You may have heard this from others already.<BR><BR>I am unable to see many RSS feed articles from my workplace PC <BR>because of IT filter settings for which I have no control. <BR>I don't pretend to understand the terminology of RSS feed as compared to an ordinary web page.<BR><BR>I only wanted to point out that some of the links posted here for perfectly legitimate purposes are somehow interpreted as personal pages or entertainment and are thus banned from being seen (I presume in many workplaces that practice high security IT or corprate policy).<BR><BR><BR>If one is posted is there a way to put an alternate link that simulates a standard web page?<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>example<BR>

<BR><BR><BR>

Example when attempting to apply for premium membership via Michael's link.

[Jim Kring]

QUOTE(John Rouse @ Apr 5 2007, 10:03 AM)

If one is posted is there a way to put an alternate link that simulates a standard web page?

It it futile to try to outsmart a SmartFilter (SmartFilter is a registered trademark of Dumb Filters, Incorporated)

http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=5416''>http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=5416'>http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=5416

[Yair]

QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 5 2007, 05:25 PM)

I'd like to as you LAVA users who follow my feed to tell if your RSS feed reader displays the ads on my feed or not.

Google Reader still displays only the content summary.

[Tomi Maila]

QUOTE(yen @ Apr 5 2007, 09:01 PM)

Google Reader still displays only the content summary.

Content summary is what I'm actually feeding. It's just Thunderbird that can show the target web page instead of feed content. I guess that Google Reader is unable to do the same. I'm still troubleshooting the missing ads and some non-working scripts with thunderbirs. I've contacted Google support to find out why their scripts don't work with Thunderbird even when scripting is turned on. I guess that the problem is with Thunderbird but it would be easier to modify Google scripts to work with Thunderbird than to modify Thunderbird JavaScript implementation. I hope I can get Google to do this.

Tomi