Crabby finally has internet back on her computer, hooray! However, she's still a day behind, and has only sort of a fake post of her own today. But in the meantime, there is a guest post following almost immediately after this one, in an effort to make up for Crabby's recent slackitude. Stay tuned!All Crabby has today is a Question and a Cartoon. The cartoon goes first, because you know you're going to skip down to it anyway. And Crabby would like you to at least see the question in case you have an opinion!
So this Nataliedee offering was sent to Crabby by Sara from HealthBolt, a much more informative health site than this one is. But gosh, why do you think this made Sara think of Cranky Fitness?
nataliedee.com
And now on to the question. It's for those of you who have Feed Readers or Blogs or have opinions about Content Distribution. (Sorry, Crabby should have warned regular readers it was a boring question!)
So Crabby has been distributing her RSS feed in its entirety, mainly because she never really thought about it one way or another. But she has recently been alerted to a couple instances of plagiarism (bad, bad, fake blogs!). And she also finds herself feeling slightly confused about the whole idea of feed 'publishing.'
The best she can tell, there are quite a few perfectly legitimate sites that take a bunch of posts from other people's blogs off their RSS feeds, collect them together, and 'distribute' them. Then people come to their sites to read things instead of going to all the original blogs. The legitimate ones always include a link to the original post.
Based on Crabby's very limited understanding of how this all works, she has mixed feelings about it. While she loves the idea of new people possibly discovering Cranky Fitness, she's afraid that when the entire post is published elsewhere, people aren't going to bother going to Cranky Fitness just for the Comments. But they should! Because everyone should see what Crabby's Smart Readers have to say.
So Crabby is curious about the option of just publishing a partial feed. So people could get a sense if they wanted to read the post, and if they did, they'd end up on Crabby's site where the Comments live. (Crabby would of course have to discover the disappointing reality of how many people out there are just going to read the first part of a post and say, "yuck, no thanks." But as depressing as that sounds, she suspects her ego could weather the blow).
What she'd hate to do, though, is mess her readers up! She doesn't want to make Cranky Fitness a hassle. Crabby herself is an internet Luddite who doesn't do her own blog visits by using Feed Readers so she's not entirely sure what impact publishing a partial feed would have. (Also she's not sure how to do it, but she remembers some option in some tab somewhere in Blogger that seemed to offer this ability. She's assuming this would actually work?)
So she's hoping some of you can advise her about all this! Would partial feeds be a Pain in the Ass? What do you other bloggers do--publish your whole feed or only part of it? Does it help your readership to have your posts floating out there in the blogosphere? Crabby is a bit over her head here, which as you all well know is nothing new!
