Hi,

The problem that you ran into is what I’ve come to call the “upgrade downgrade” problem: FeedWordPress strongly encourages you to upgrade MagpieRSS to a newer and much more capable version than the one packaged with WordPress, but when you upgrade your version of WordPress, one of the files that you get in the upgrade package is a brand new copy of the old and busted MagpieRSS, which overwrites your upgraded version. In the most recent versions of FeedWordPress. I discuss the problem (from back when WordPress 2.5 was released) here: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/blogs/radgeek/2008/04/18/upgrade-downgrade. Current versions of FeedWordPress should put up a loud warning in the WordPress Dashboard if you log in after inadvertently reverting your copy of MagpieRSS. Let me know if this failed to happen for you; if so, I’ll investigate a bit to try and figure out why you weren’t notified of the problem.

Eventually (as in, within about 2-3 releases from now), I intend to transition FeedWordPress from MagpieRSS to the much more advanced SimplePie package which is now included with newer versions of WordPress. But it’s going to be somewhat tricky because the existing filtering interface is based around MagpieRSS implementations, so I need to write a compatibility layer if I want to avoid breaking other people’s filters.

If you’re curious, the reason you got posts with just capital “A,” in particular, it was probably because the feed you were syndicating included MediaRSS extensions, and in particular a media:content element. (WordPress.com feeds, for example, include MediaRSS meta-data by default.) The old version of MagpieRSS had a bug in its parsing code that mangled post contents if it encountered any other element named “content,” even if it was in a different namespace. My customized branch of MagpieRSS eliminated the bug, but, as mentioned, when you upgraded WordPress it temporarily reverted MagpieRSS back to the old and busted version, which lost that upgrade.

FeedWordPress is a tool for copying hypertext from one place to another. (Specifically, hypertext stored in a handful of common machine-readable formats.) Like many other tools that can be used to copy information — such as xerox machines, optical scanners, OCR software, HTTP servers, or Bic(tm) ballpoint pens — FeedWordPress can be put to both legitimate and illegitimate uses. Like any other tool, it has no way of knowing whether or not the information being copied is being copied with or without the permission of the person who originally created it; the responsibility for using it appropriately (as many people do — for example, to create “planet” websites that contributors sign up to join, or to automate cross-posting, or to create “lifestreams” that aggregate all of their own online activity) lies with the user, not with the tool.

And, speaking of responsibility, in your article you write: “Charles John­son, the creator of Feed­Word­Press is in con­stant and fre­quent vi­o­la­tion of copyright law be­cause the ap­par­ent ma­jority of his blog’s con­tent is stolen with­out the original au­thors’ per­mis­sion.”

You then link to Feminist Blogs — a topical aggregator that I’ve run since November 2004 — as “my blog” (it’s not; my blog is at radgeek.com).

This is a serious accusation. Do you have absolutely any evidence whatsoever that any of the feeds syndicated on Feminist Blogs are syndicated without the express permission of the author or authors? If so, what evidence do you have?

Hi,

Since you mention it, I thought you might be interested to know (if you don’t already) that the problem you noticed with mis-attribution of authors has been fixed in the most recent release of FeedWordPress, version 2008.1105.

(If you’re curious, the problem was more of a relationship problem between FeedWordPress and BlogSpot than a problem exclusively with either. If FeedWordPress can’t find a syndicated author in the WordPress database by name, it then looks for someone with a matching e-mail address before it goes ahead to create a new user account. Unfortunately BlogSpot uses a single generic e-mail address for every user who does not want their own e-mail address listed (noreply@blogger.com). So older versions of FeedWordPress took the matching e-mail addresses to indicate that the authors were the same person. The newer version is more circumspect; there’s a list of generic e-mail addresses that it doesn’t take to uniquely indicate the author of the post. (By default, the list consists entirely of “noreply@blogger.com.” But if you notice this issue coming up with other generic e-mail addresses, you can add them under Syndication :: Authors.)

Hope this helps!

Charles “Rad Geek” Johnson Author, FeedWordPress

This is a software bug in feed consumers, related to some mistakes, rather easily made under certain conditions, as to how to handle Yahoo’s MediaRSS namespaced elements. It is not, essentially, a problem with WordPress.com’s feeds.

FeedWordPress users may be pleased to know that this bug has been fixed in the latest release of FeedWordPress, version 0.991.