Don't Fuck With Mama

We're losing one of our most prominent bloggers today, Mama Tulip. Be sure to go over there and let her know what she's meant to you.

Personally? I'm hurt... and way beyond pissed. But not toward her. She has very legitimate reasons for leaving. I'm ticked because these "reasons" should have never been a concern for her in the first place. Or for any of us, for that matter. There are websites out there that are stealing our blogs, word for word, and not giving credit to us. They're scalping our pictures, stealing our lives, republishing our stories, and getting PAID for it through advertisements. They may be doing it to you as we speak.

It's called "splogging" and Google isn't doing a damn thing about it. Part of me is worried. But in general, it's made me determined. I refuse to be bullied into shutting down shop. I'm trying to research ways for us to lock down our sites. It's slow going and I'm not very adept at HTML. I'm looking for a code that will disable right-clicking, making it more difficult for copy-and-paste thieves. Then I'm going to focus on a way to cloak our web addresses, or redirect them to a copyright message. I've heard this can be done.

Here are four suggestions that were given to me:

1. Include your blog address in every post title. This way people can tell where the post originally came from if it's stolen and reposted. The down side is, that will pretty much eliminate any room for an actual title.

2. Get off of Blogger. Out of all the blog providers, Blogger is the worst for spam and stolen content. Not only do they not offer any protection to their customers, but they rarely respond or act on complaints about plagiarism.

3. Switch to partial feed. I believe you can do this in Blogger by going to "Settings" and then "Site Feed" and changing the "Descriptions" from full to short. The disadvantage of this is that it's annoying to readers. People like to pop in and pop out, not click around just to read one post.

4. Put a copyright notice at the footer of each post. You can do this by changing a few things around in your template.

A little over half way down you should see this code:

Replace the highlighted areas with this:

Make sure you switch my name and dates with your own.

It's not much, but it is a start.

(UPDATE)I THINK THEY'RE ON TO ME. I have not been able to access Google, Blogger, or Pickled Beef since directly after I posted. But I know others have been able to, since a copy of everyone's comments goes directly to my email. So I'm sorry for not visiting anyone today! Hopefully this message will update, as it's taken me 30 minutes to get on here and I can't check it after it's posted. I'll try again tonight.