Don’t send your readers temporary blog post trash |
How would you feel about someone coming to your house and littering on your porch under the guise of it being ‘temporary’ when you are the one who has to pick it up? Would that still be littering? Sure it would. These temporary blog posts for style detection are bogus. They might be temporary to the blog and blogger but some of them still show up in reader’s feeds like this:
Just say no! Like this provides any sort of reader value?
There are less intrusive and more intelligent ways to detect the style of a blog post if that’s the aim of the software/service. Yeah, I’m looking at your Windows Live Writer even though this post is being written using that system. I just say no whenever asked this question because I don’t want any readers to see this trash. And for the systems out there who think it’s cool to do a temporary blog post to detect blog ownership, that’s even more stupid. If you’re the blog owner you can put some sort of image or file on the server that isn’t in a blog post to show you own the blog. Heck you could sandwich in a verification code at the end of a legitimate post and that wouldn’t be temporary trash.
I purposefully blurred out the offending blog above because I don’t want this to be about the offending blogger, but the system which is stupid. There were actually two of these in my RSS reader this morning. Two bloggers who didn’t realize that there is no such thing as temporary in the RSS world.
Once you hit publish and it changes the RSS feed it is released and somebody could see it somewhere else. One of your readers, your mother, the pope, the President, a terrorist, anybody. Do you want everybody to see your temporary trash? As a reader and blogger I sure don’t. Just say no!
Oh, and got to love the 13 FeedFlares attached to the signature. Yeah, I’ll digg this, stumble it, add to mixx, share in Facebook, yadda, yadda. Argh.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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I’ve seen those. When I get someone wanting to comment and it says “Ping Back”…..is that the same thing?
Comment by Grog — February 26, 2009 @ 11:56 am PST
No, the pingbacks are from new (and usually legitimate) posts, Grog.
Comment by TDavid — February 26, 2009 @ 3:54 pm PST
I don’t think it’s the authors’ fault, I blame Windows Live Writer — when I did this on my own blog, I had no idea it was going to leave a remnant in my RSS feed (only way I knew is because I subscribe to my own feed).
Comment by Ravi — February 26, 2009 @ 11:04 pm PST
aside from these. useless blog posts also annoy me. i’ve unsubscribed from shoemoney and john chows blog because 4 out of 5 of their blog posts are useless. it seems like they post just for the post of posting something.
Comment by delldell — February 27, 2009 @ 12:55 am PST
Well Ravi WLW does ask the author to confirm that this is OK to do before doing it, so the author at best isn’t reading what they are confirming.
Comment by TDavid — February 27, 2009 @ 5:57 am PST
If I remember correctly (since it’s been a while since I’ve used WLW), it asks you about a temporary blog post, no mention about leaving something in your RSS feed. In fact, I think that’s a feature of Google Reader, that it saves RSS posts even if they were deleted from the original feed.
Annoying? Absolutely. But I think it’s on Microsoft to come up with a better way to detect your blog style (surely they can use the most recent post and detect it from there rather than having to create a brand new post?).
Comment by Ravi — February 27, 2009 @ 8:15 am PST
There are many ways to prove ownership of blog / site including meta tags or image / file on the server. I haven’t seen a system that uses ‘tags / words’ in genuine posts to establish ownership.
Comment by Jeet — March 1, 2009 @ 8:15 am PST
About temporary blog posts, I find it stupid too because it shows up in reader’s feed and anybody can read it.
@ delldell, same here, too! useless blog posts also annoys me. There are some blogs that seem interesting but when you get to read their posts, only one or two are meaningful, some posts are already useless.
Comment by April Sonderversicherung — March 5, 2009 @ 6:25 am PST
In fact, I think that’s a feature of Google Reader, that it saves RSS posts even if they were deleted from the original feed.
Comment by Kurtlar Vadisi — March 5, 2009 @ 11:33 pm PST
A way to prove ownership of a site is the add a CNAME rule in your DNS, pointing to the site that want to validate the owner identity.. You can do this on Google apps, for example.
Comment by Nick — April 10, 2009 @ 5:03 pm PST
These useless blog posts are sometimes one of the results of ‘earn money by blogging’ category!
Comment by Simon — September 18, 2009 @ 6:16 am PST