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Round 7 begins Wednesday August 6th. I thought I’d answer some common questions that arise and give one last site tip before the round begins. First, the answers to some common questions:

1. The round starts on Wednesday August 6th at midnight EST and ends at 11:59pm EST.
2. You do not have to be the owner of the site to submit it (the owner can have someone submit their site for them).
3. We only accept sites that have at least six months of consistent writing. Usually after six months a new blogger has a feel for their writing style, how often they want to update their site and have more surety in the topic they wish to write about. It is not uncommon for someone to start a blog and in two months move on to something else or stop writing completely.
4. The next round will be November 5th, 2008.
5. What do we look for? There are a bunch of site tips that help explain what we look for.
6. If your site was not accepted in a previous round you can submit your site for this round (particularly if your site was not accepted last round if you emailed me, I responded as to why the site was not accepted).

If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask. You can send me an email at tyme@9rules.com if you’d like.

Ok, on to the tip….

It is not unusual for site owners to change domains, content management systems or make changes to the site that cause the RSS feed for the site to change. In order to insure that no readers are lost the site owner needs to set up a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. I’m going to give you a live example (until the site fixes it of course lol).

A Socialite’s Life feed is in my feed reader. I have quite a few RSS feeds in the feed reader and although I noticed the feed reader was unable to access their feed, I forgot about it. It was weeks later that I decided to check out why the error was still there after so much time. Their site changed (I have no idea about all the changes that happened) but the feed URL changed from this to this. They redirected their old URL to the new one and redirected old URLs of articles to the new URLs but didn’t touch the feed URL I used. The last update I received in my RSS reader was June 12, 2008.

Now here’s the problem to the site owner and why to avoid this as much as possible: I still feel “informed” even without their content in my feed reader. I have nothing against the site and they do have original content but for weeks I did fine without them, why should I edit the URL in my feed reader? The odds are that most readers in my position would remove the RSS over checking to see why it no longer works and taking the extra step to edit it. A reader will if they “missed” the updates or felt uninformed on the topic. Keep in mind with “news” it is all about who covers it first sometimes (unless there is unique commentary). I remember there were times when Socialite’s Life covered it first and I clicked to their site and browsed around or someone else covered it - the news balanced out. Perhaps I am getting the same news an hour or two later (or whatever) but I’m not feeling unformed. I still haven’t edited the feed’s URL and that is the key for a site owner: updating the bad URLs before the reader removes them.

As many times as I’ve changed domains and flip-flopped between content management systems I know exactly what this is like. I care more about interaction than traffic (stats) but I do check the error logs periodically and that is how you can find if people are attempting to access something and receiving and error.

Check your error logs people! You might be shocked to see what you find.

I look forward to reviewing your site Round 7. If you have any questions, let me know.

I have a question and I want you to be honest. Many sites integrate a “thank you” to their sponsors, listing the sponsors and perhaps some blurb about the company, as an entry on their site. These posts most likely will remain in the archive and usually appears in the RSS feed.

My question: Do you read those entries?

Personally, I don’t read them. I asked about 15 people I see online if they read them - they don’t. I don’t read them because they have zero value to me. I’d more likely click on an ad than pay attention to the “thank you” articles. Why? Because they usually aren’t tailored to be of any benefit to the reader. They are tailored more to fulfill an obligation to the advertiser.

As a blog owner, if you do that…why? Wouldn’t it be a win/win situation if the reader paid attention to content and clicked on it? Wouldn’t that make the blog/site more appealing to seek advertising in the future? Wouldn’t that give the site/blog an edge over others?

So tell me, do you read the thank you to our sponsor entries, particularly if they appear in your feed reader?

Reading the 9rules member feeds, I came across an article by Brajeshwar that I think everyone can benefit from. He describes how he found foreign code in the header file.

I woke up today morning to find that my site feed wasn’t validating and the XMLRPC was not responding when I tried to update MarsEdit. Upon doing a quick “View Source” I found a foreign code lodged on top of my site’s header. I knew instantly that it shouldn’t be there and that something is wrong.

Brajeshwar uses his own theme so he knew that code didn’t belong there. For the average WordPress user viewing the source code would be like trying to understand a language he or she does not speak. An example: for those that drive how many people can fix the car they drive if it breaks? Mechanics can but most people have to take the car in to be repaired. Same with a blog; many people use blogging tools but if something goes wrong are unable to diagnose and repair/resolve the issue.

Brajeshwar gives an easy to follow guide on the steps he used to secure his site, even sharing the code for an .htaccess file that prevents comment spam by denying access to no-referrer requests. Take a moment and read the article. You might learn something.

This article isn’t about WordPress being unsafe because honestly, all scripts will have vulnerabilities from time to time. Pay more attention to how quickly the company patches the security issues and informs their user base. When a patch is released, update your scripts as soon as possible.

This article is about paying more attention to your site than just posting entries. This is a situation the average user wouldn’t notice without looking for it. Just like a lawn has to be cared for in order to maintain it, your blog needs attention if your content is to remain safe, no matter what content management system you are using.

Many bloggers/writers state an opinion in their articles. Sometimes it is a formal review or it could be someone sharing an experience they had. What would you do if the company or person you were talking about contacted you and requested that you remove the article? This situation happens often. Reading Ars Technica, Atari went after a site over their negative review. The site received a copy of the game early, not via the publisher, and Atari claims the site did not respect the embargo on the game. If the site received the game via the publisher that would make sense, however, the site allegedly received the game earlier via retail. The site claims Atari pulled their advertising campaign with them in retaliation. In another example, a blogger wrote a negative restaurant review and the restaurant owner called their job to complain about it.

I know, you’re thinking that you don’t write reviews and this couldn’t or wouldn’t happen to you. What about when you have a bad experience with a company and you blog about it? What if that company contacted you and wanted to sue? Honestly, you don’t hear companies going off when they are written about in a positive light. You have a lousy flight experience, you write about your experience and a week or two later the airline is threatening you. What do you do?

That’s something to research. What are the laws in your area? Do you want to fight for your rights or do you not care and you’ll just remove the article? What are the goals of your site and how do the answers to those questions fit in with your future plans?

Many people get online and write without really thinking through the possible repercussions of what they do; until it is too late (action has already been taken against you). The longer one writes online the more experienced one becomes in these areas. Some people decide to fight it tooth and nail. Others remove the article in question (or does whatever it takes not to go to court) to resolve the issue quickly. One response isn’t “better” than the other – it depends on your goals for you site. So, to get the ball rolling:

If you received a request to remove an article where you expressed your opinion or experience about a company or service, would you fight it or would you remove the article? The sad point in situations like this, the law might be on the writer’s side but the writer would have to spend resources to have the law recognized in their favor. Some people or companies have to learn that negative criticism will come…learn from it.

This weekend TechDirt published an article about Associated Press (AP) sending Drudge Retort, a site that mocks Drudge Report, seven DMCA requests siting that the instances they specified in their DMCA requests were not fair use. In Cadenhead’s article he points out that one of the AP articles uses 18 words, a quote from Hillary Clinton, and links back to the originating article. Looking at Drudge Retort I found instances where almost 1/3 of the original article was used (non-AP content).

I was talking to someone online and I mentioned this situation. Their response was that they didn’t use AP articles so there was no need for concern. It didn’t cross their mind that Yahoo articles might be an AP article. One of the DMCA requests was for this article syndicated via Yahoo. This could cause a blurred sense of perception. A writer or blogger could be thinking “Yahoo is safe” when that doesn’t seem to be the case, does it? It’s not Yahoo’s content, it’s AP’s.

The bottom line is that there seems to be a disconnect on what is considered fair use. Content creators have different requirements on how their content should be used. Some writers do not mind if their articles are redistributed in full and on the flip side, others prefer permission be granted for any use but cannot get around fair use.

There are quite a few people talking about this. One cannot deny it does bring up the question, as writers, how our content should be used and just as important: how much outside content should be used on our sites.

Do you have clear policies in place on your site that lets people know how your content can be used?