Never mind the scrapers!

Those who subscribe to Gear Diary’s RSS know that for the longest time we have used an abbreviated or truncated feed. If you read a bit and liked what you saw, then you could click the link and come see the rest of the article on the main site. The biggest reason we did this was because in the site’s early days we started off with a full feed — which was promptly scraped and reposted on various other sites around the net. That led to truncating the feed and at least having the knowledge that when our feeds were scraped the resulting post would automatically have a link back to Gear Diary in the form of the “read more” link that went to the rest of the article.

Scraping is still a problem, and its severity seems to come and go; nothing new there. So what’s changed?

Last week all of the Gawker Media sites that I enjoy, including Gizmodo, Jezebel and Lifehacker truncated their feeds without any fanfare. I was so spoiled by reading their full feeds that at first I didn’t notice what was different, and then I was like … “ooooh man!”

Then I found a workaround (that works for now anyway) — you can get their full feeds by entering the name of the site plus “vip.xml” (without the quotation marks) — which is what I immediately did. And then I realized that I was being completely hypocritical. Why should I enjoy full feeds on those sites when I wasn’t even offering them to you? That was a major FAIL on my part.

Well, enough of that … effective immediately, you now have a choice: you can subscribe to Gear Diary FULL FEEDS or our old-fashioned Abbreviated or Truncated Feeds by clicking the RSS logos on the upper right column (the left RSS symbol is the full feed, the one on the right is the truncated version), or you can click the feed buttons under posts on their individual pages. There’s also an option to subscribe to the comments, for those who hate to miss a good debate.

And as always – thank you for being part of our readership; we are happy to have you here.