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Blog Housekeeping

Received the following question from a reader of the blog:

I notice that I/we can no longer read full posts in Google Reader (or other feed readers, I’d imagine). Is this because you’re now sporting ads from an ad network? (And if not, might you consider resetting the new and handsome looking blog back to full feeds?)

When we talked to our tax preparers this year, I decided I would try to write off some of the not insignificant costs for the blog.

Talking to them, however, they told me it is difficult to claim these expenses unless you are at least trying to make money off of what you are doing. Since I have never even tried to make a cent off the blog, I decided the easiest way to try to make money, would be to run an ad network. Not that the fairly meager traffic which crosses the blog will actually even make enough money to pay for the hosting.

What do people think of the Foodbuzz ads? They are often for giant companies like Quaker and whatnot, but I find them fairly tasteful and non-distracting. Besides, I do, in fact, have Oatmeal for breakfast every day, though from Bob’s Red Mill, not Quaker.

I briefly tried google ad words, but they kept putting up ads for things that I was trash talking in the posts, so that really didn’t work for me.

I have been experimenting with truncating the RSS feeds, not to drive traffic, but to prevent content theft. There are a lot of sites out there that harvest RSS feeds and republish them without credit. I guess they somehow make money from them using google ad sense. A number of my friends have fallen prey to these “sploggers”, as have I. Apparently the two best ways to prevent content theft are to include a copyright in your RSS feed and to truncate your feed.

How inconvenient is this for people?

I’m still experimenting with the settings of the “Better Feed” plugin so nothing is really written in stone at the moment.

4 thoughts on “Blog Housekeeping”

  1. I agree with your own assessment of the ads, so good luck with that. I also (now) understand why you’re truncating the posts. If that’s something you need to do, so be it. We’ll all move happily forward. But speaking for myself as well as a number of friends and colleagues who use readers, we really find having to click through unnecessary and a bit aggravating. (Not complaining, here, clearly. Just sharing the pov. :) )

  3. I’ve come to the same point that Erik has.

    I don’t post my full content to my feed, not because I care all that much about ad revenue, but because unscrupulous people out there were filling their sites with my content and the hassle of hunting each of them down was proving to be too much of a pain in the butt.

    Maybe it’s not worth hunting them down, I don’t know. I just know that as a small-time blogger it’s incredibly frustrating to see another site pulling eyeballs away from your site and collecting the credit for content that you built in your limited spare time.

  4. I don’t mind only having parts of the posts showing on feed readers once it´s for a good reason.
    It´s totally understandable.

    In the other hand, I’ve seen people that manage to spin things around and actually get more traffic from these content thieves. What they did was include some links (not few) to their past content on many of their posts that were being used by the bastards.

    This way the stolen content actually drove quite a bit of traffic back to their website. Of course, they have ways to prevent that from working, and the links must be relevant for your readers.

    Including a link to the permanent link of the post in the end of every article could be interesting too.
    Marleigh, feeds her excerpts in away that is almost impossible for you not to click thru. Although she doesn´t feed the whole content, the great pictures and a good bit of history entice you to check out the rest.

    Never forgetting to feed the picture is one thing to keep in mind.

    Keep up the great work! Cheers,

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