I removed the "Boatbuilding News" forum as the number of blog posts and news items just seemed unmanageable for a forum. The excerpts of the feeds are available daily at our
news page, and I will soon incorporate them into the bottom half of the home page.
The script I am using to import the news items relies on the expected knowledge of the content publisher to know what he is publishing. Previously, if the content publisher pushed out his content via RSS, the script didn't argue with his decision to either publish excerpts, or the entire article. What I am finding, though, is that many bloggers don't even know that they are granting non-exclusive rights to republish their content by having full posts in their RSS feed. The legal requirement is that the re-publisher provide attribution, with a link back, as my script does. One content author did object to seeing his post here.
Legal issues aside, I don't want to offend anyone. I removed all the posts this morning, and then reset the subscriptions to exclude the site from the publisher who doesn't really want to publish (he really should edit his RSS settings!) I edited the script this morning to publish only the first 200 characters (give or take a few, depending on where the word breaks are), and added yet another link to the original content. The purpose is to drive traffic to the original sites and expose their content to the wider boat building community. Readers coming to messing-about.com will be able to quickly scan the most recent articles from subscriber feeds to find new sites of interest.
messing-about.com's
forums currently get 6,200 unique visitors with over 50,000 page views, with 42% of that traffic from search engines. And that's just in the forums. As we create more news and other content, that traffic will only increase. Google lists more than 27,000 links to our content currently:
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Link backs from our
News Feed will improve a site's listing in search engines, and drive traffic to their site. Republishing an RSS feed excerpt is not treated as "duplicate content" by the search engines due to the indexing tags I use in the script.
If you have a blog or site with an RSS feed you would like included, let me know. As I find sites publishing their content via RSS I will continue to include them in our News Feed, and will continue to honor any publisher's request to have their feed removed.
