and covering up our questionable practices…
It’s been a few days since I fanned the flames of how a big time edu consultant was republishing from other bloggers as their own. Its so easy to sweep your shit crap poop Numero 2 under the rug. It just smells a bit, but most people just walk around and pretend it is not there.
Thats old news already. They dismantled their industry news where this occurred and in the best of slick covers, have completely skipped being open about this. I am betting they canned their wordpress developers (?)/ The word I got in a comment was:
“We have asked the company that manages our website to remove the (Feed WordPress) syndication technology that was updating the news channel. The feed has been turned off as it pertains to several blog sites due to technological errors in attribution when the plugin was recently updated.
and more techno blame:
Its trying to be informative to the education community. The organization just began using Feedwordpress to assemble industry news and is still working the bugs out on correct configuration.
I hope to have them up and running effectively over the next few days working the bugs out of proper attribution to the authors.
Well I don’t consult for all those big named badge companies, but I figured out an attribution solution in about 35 minutes. I am working on a new Feed WordPress powered site where we are pulling all of the source content into the site (like Gilfus did), but I wanted to provide attribution back to the original source (which Gilfus did not do).
And to demonstrate what a lousy businessperson I am, I am going to give them the solution for free! Am I crazy or what?
You see Feedwordpress provides the source name, link, and permalink as post meta data. It takes but a whiff of PHP to put that on any template.
Here you go, here comes the money code:
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<?php if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'syndication_permalink')) { // yep we are syndicated echo '<br />This was <a href="'. get_post_meta($post->ID, 'syndication_permalink', true) .'">originally published</a> at <a href="' . get_post_meta($post->ID, 'syndication_source_uri', true) . '">' . get_post_meta($post->ID, 'syndication_source', true) . '</a>'; } ?> |
Tada!
If Steve really wants to show his appreciation, that six pack of cool Dogfishhead 120 Minute IPA would do it.
One thing they did was to harvest my feed, but since they didn’t want to run my commentary, they downloaded the article directly from the link URL provided. Hence a bunch of posts authored by others were credited to me (during that short period where they experimented with providing autocredits). Your solution would work better, but not perfectly (as they desired): it would display my text, not the post I am describing, crediting it to me, and showing the title and credits I run in my own blog.
I’ve long thought it interesting the way blogging in the main has diverged form the model I created originally. Every one of my posts in OLDaily (a) links to another post, and (b) provides blog and name attribution for that link automatically. If the rest of the world had followed my model we would have created this wonderful net of interlinked posts. But that didn’t happen – WP & Blogger blogs contain a title and description, and that’s basically it. No link out, no autoattribution, no connections. It was a missed opportunity.
Really? They’re working on it?
Wow.
This is something that should be designed, and QA’d before it ever sees the light of day. Anyone who runs a content website should know this!
The fact that they just rolled it out with no apparent care to properly attribute the content owner or author says a lot.
Damn the torpedoes – until we get caught.
Then we can just blame it on the technology department.
AL
You know there’s actually an existing add-on for FWP that does attribution: http://projects.radgeek.com/add-attribution-feedwordpress/
They don’t even have to modify their theme.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeet even easier. I wish RadGeek would post these on th FWP page at wordpress.org – I looked there for extras.