Tired of seeing this every time you use Firefox’s built-in RSS handling to add a site’s feed to your Google Reader account?

Me too, so I figured out a way to get rid of it. Now I’ll show you how too.

Simply type ‘about:config’ into your url bar, and as soon as all that scary-looking stuff loads, scroll down until you see ‘browser.contentHandlers.types.2.uri’, and then double click it.

A dialog will pop up asking for a uri, and will be pre-filled with ‘http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=%s’.

Simply replace it with ‘http://google.com/reader/preview/*/feed/%s’ then restart Firefox.

Next time you click on an RSS feed, you’ll see a preview of it in Google Reader, completely bypassing the option to add it to your Google homepage.

Note: You’ll need to actually click the ‘subscribe’ button in the preview window to subscribe, so the sum total of clicks will be the same, they just won’t be dealing with Google’s bad UI decision. Besides, it’s nice to see the contents of the feed before committing to it. I routinely change my mind if a feed is only a partial-text feed.

Defined tags for this entry: firefox, google, howto, rss

So you’ve got your blog all set up, you’ve been publishing for a while, and all of a sudden you learn that people have been “hotlinking” to your images. This outrages you, so you set up an .htaccess rule to replace any “hotlinked” images with a graphic that says “Stealing Images Makes You A Jerk!”

That ought to teach those jerks for stealing your images… right? Sure it will, but I’ve got a question for you: Do you have an RSS feed?

Oh, you do?

Well, you’ve also just prevented all those “jerks” who subscribe to your feed from “stealing” your images too. Wait, you want them to be able to see your images? Of course you do.

The trick is to set up your .htaccess file to allow certain websites to be able to display your images, while blocking everyone else. You’d do it by making your .htaccess file look something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?livejournal.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?google.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?bloglines.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?newsgator.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?yahoo.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?rojo.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?newsburst.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?pluck.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?aol.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?msn.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?ixquick.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*)?skweezer.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule /images/(.*).(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|bmp) /images/DoNotSteal.png [NC]

What that does is look to see if your image is being loaded from some other website. If it is it then checks to see if that website is one of the “approved” ones. If the site in question is in the list, the image is displayed normally—but if it’s not, your “Do Not Steal” graphic gets displayed instead.

That list is all of the online RSS aggregators I know of. If you want to add your friend’s site to your approved list, just copy one of the lines up there, substituting in the proper domain name. Don’t include the “www,” because that little ”(.*)?” will match that if it’s there.

If you use a reader that’s not in that list, let me know so I can update the list here.

Defined tags for this entry: geeky, howto, htaccess, prevent hotlinking, rss, stealing content

I was just checking some stats and discovered this:

http://www.thaiweb20.com/celebrity/

If you look closely at that Wordpress blog, almost all of the posts have my email address associated with them. Crazy.

It turns out that they’re aggregating a variety of different celebrity-based RSS feeds and have some sort of bug in whatever software they’re using to do so, because they did have my post about Charlford’s ultrasound in there, but nearly every post after that is attributed to me as well.

People, if you’re gonna steal other people’s content, make sure you’re doing it properly :)

Now that I know they’re just automatically putting up anything I send down the ‘celebrity’ pipe, I must say that I’m quite tempted to use this power for evil…

Defined tags for this entry: geeky, rss, stealing content

I’ve been preparing for some time to write a long treatise on the evils of “partial-text” RSS feeds, and how I think everyone should switch to “full-text” feeds instead. I was going to point out that requiring people to actually come to your site to get the content is soooo 1999, and that the only conceivable reason for doing so was to improve your ad revenue. I’m not against ads per se, I just don’t think they ought to inform your decisions on how your readers read your site.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there are peope who actually prefer to subscribe to feeds that don’t contain the full text of articles. Presumably this is so they can more easily skim the content they don’t want to read. It’s not my cup of tea, but I now recognize that insisting that everyone use the type of feeds I like is pretty short-sighted. Now I’m going to argue that anyone providing RSS feeds of their content really ought to provide both a full-text and a partial-text feed, allowing the subscribers to make this decision.

With than in mind, I’ve now updated the site with new badges and new ‘autodetected’ feeds for browsers that can handle them. I’ll also be updating the UI of the site to reflect the fact that pretty much anything can be read as an RSS feed, but in the meantime, any feed on the site can now be made a partial-text feed by simply tacking on ”?partial” to the end of the url.

I did this by mucking around with the actual guts of my blog software, but for those of you who don’t want to (or can’t) engage in this type of haxoring, I suspect that there are 3rd-party feed services one could install. I know when I was looking into aggregating my feeds into the Nyquil Network feed, 95% of the different feed manipulator services I tried only generated partial-text feeds, so it ought to be a snap to get one of them to make you such a feed. Maybe Yahoo Pipes?

Will people subscribe to these partial-text feeds? I really doubt it, but they’re there should someone want to. I’d hate to find out that someone who might otherwise be interested in my drivel was turned away because they couldn’t subscribe the way they want. I know that I’ve sure unsubscribed from people for not using full-text feeds, so I think this is a wise step to have made.

Thoughts? Problems? (Oh, also: apologies to anyone whose feed reader caught me in the middle of haxoring. All sorts of crazy stuff was happening for a while there.)

Defined tags for this entry: blogging, full feeds, geeky, partial feeds, rants, rss