Asymptomatic

This weekend, instead of attending the Philly meetup that I organize, I'm heading up to New York City to visit with Jason and his meetup.

In case you wondered, the Philly meetup is still on, even though I won't be there, I'm sure some people will show. Check the RSVP list. Don't forget that the Philly Weblogger (non-WordPress) folks show up right afterward, so be sure to have a beer and wait around.

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I was thinking a bit about the meetups that have been going on in Philadelphia and in New York City. We don't really have a format for our discussions. Not that I was thinking of changing that, but I was curious:

If you could have someone who knows something about WordPress talk about one thing with you, what would it be?

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I had an online conversation yesterday with an acquaintence of mine. She was alarmed to have found that her entire site's content had been republished by some other site!

Apparently, their site had been sucking on her site's RSS file for quite some time, and managed to download a sizeable chunk of data, which they subsequently republished with their own ads strewn about. And she's not the only one by a long shot.

If you're not aware of this phenomenon, it's generally referred to as "Splogging", for "spam blogging". The idea is usually to re-blog content form other people's blogs to gain emphasis on their popular terms for your splog site.

For example, if I wanted my site to be a popular search result for "student loans", first I would install a blog on my server. I would then use some software to aggregate, say, the Technorati feed for posts tagged with "student loans", which gives me a rich bed of content to start populating my site. Using some some dodgy plugins sold by less-than-respectable authors, I can even have WordPress do all of this work for me.

Then, I sprinkle a few links onto the splog that point to my money-making page, and voila! Instant PageRank!

The bottom line for bloggers is that your popular content will be stolen and used to fuel a link farm that profits someone else. How nice. So what do you do to combat it? I have a suggestion or two.

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There are a bunch of folks who don't get it or don't like it, so I figured I would take the time to explain Planet WordPress to the extent that I can, since it seems that I'm the one that usually causes the most problems with duplicated feed items, etc.

Planet WordPress is a site that aggregates feeds from a number of users who have contributed to the WordPress Open Source project, or who provide good sources of information on WordPress, its themes, or its plugins. Planet WordPress produces a feed that is displayed in the Dashboard of most WordPress installations.

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If you're in Philadelphia this weekend, come join us for the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup at 2pm on Saturday. We're a pretty relaxed group, and we're definitely not all geeky (ok, I'm usually the only geek present) so don't think that you need to have technical skills to come hang out.

We talk about WordPress and general blogging, and if you have technical questions there is usually someone around who can point you in the right direction. For example, we have had discussions on how enthusiastic new WordPress designers can create more advanced themes for WordPress. We've talked about the best plugins to use for different purposes. And we've also talked about recipies for desserts. Like I said, very informal.

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