Monday, August 17, 2009

Format change - more info

Thanks for being so understanding about the format change of my RSS feed. Since several of you asked, I thought I'd give you a little more information on how I found out that my content was being illegally published as well as how to change the settings of your RSS feed to make it more difficult for people to do this.

I found out by accident. I was actually looking up a dress pattern that I had made to see other versions of the dress. I googled "Simplicity XXXX" (I can't remember the number right now) and I clicked on the third site that appeared. To my surprise, I saw it was my post - word for word! There were no links back to my site, and I was not given credit for the post anywhere. I couldn't really understand how it got there. After browsing through the site, I found several other posts of mine on there. The site appeared to have posts from other sewers, though I didn't recognize the other blogs (again, the original posters were not given credit and there were no links to the original blog). I found out who the publisher of this blog was (someone in Singapore), and emailed him and asked him to take down my content. Thankfully, he did. My guess is that this person set up a blog of their own and ripped off other sewing blogs with the intent of getting money from adclicks. I was never given an explanation. The scary thing is that I found this out by accident, so I have no idea how many other sites out there may be publishing my content without my permission.

Changing your RSS feed to "preview" mode makes it harder for people to rip off your posts. In Blogger, click on the Settings Tab, then click on "Site Feed". Under "Blog Posts Feed", click on the "short" option.

I hope this helps.

3 comments:

  1. crazy business! imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...right? good grief! i'm fairly certain I don't have any content worth ripping off, but maybe I'll google next time I get bored ;)

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  2. This is scary stuff. I'm going to google myself and see what happens.

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  3. So not cool. Hope changing the RSS feed setting works.

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