Current version: 1.01 (5th December 2007) | Read The Changelog

Allows you to add a copyright statement and a link to the original article, to the TOP of your feed entries, in an effort to hamper content scrapers.

Features

• Add a copyright statement and a link to the original article to the top of your feed entries
• Build your own customised message, including your site name, site URL, post name, post URL and author name
• Simple HTML can be used to enhance appearance
• Doesn’t affect the comment feed
• If you use DualFeeds, the message is only shown for the full post feed

Why Use It?

Content scraping of full post feeds is on the rise. Finding your content displayed, in full, on another site is very frustrating.

There are a variety of plugins to help with this, including several which allow you to add a copyright statement to the end of feed entries. However the copyright statement has limited impact by the time the reader gets to the bottom of the page.

The reader is more likely to take action if they see the copyright statement at the beginning of the page, along with a link to the original article.

Requirements

WordPress 2.x.x (tested on WordPress 2.3.1, 2.3, 2.2.2 and 2.1.3).

Installation

• Download the file and unzip it.
• Upload the feedentryheader folder to the wp-content/plugins folder.
• Activate the FeedEntryHeader plugin within WordPress.

Upgrade

• Download the file and unzip it.
• Upload the feedentryheader folder to the wp-content/plugins folder, overwriting the existing files.

Usage

Once the plugin is activated, the default message will be added to your feed. The default message can be changed on the FeedEntryHeader page in the Options menu.

You can use the following ‘tags’ in your message:

• [##SITENAME##] – Site Name
• [##SITEURL##] – Site URL
• [##POSTNAME##] – Post Name
• [##POSTURL##] – Post URL
• [##AUTHOR##] – Author Name
• [##YEAR##] – Year (for Copyright statement)

To reset the message to the default, copy and paste the default message to the FeedEntryHeader Message field, then choose Update Options.

Many content scrapers remove all links, leaving the anchor text behind. For this reason I have set the default message to use the post URL (rather than the post name) as the anchor text.

If you ask users to contact you if they are reading the copyright message on another website, don’t use your email address, as spammers may find it and start sending you spam. It’s better to give a URL for a contact page.

Although this plugin was designed for displaying a copyright statement, there is no reason that you could not display other items instead.

Compatibility

FeedEntryHeader has not been extensively tested with other feed plugins but it is very unlikely there will be any problems.

Related Plugins

If you want to add a copyright statement to the bottom of your feed entries, I recommend RSS Signature or Feed Footer. There’s also Angussmans Feed Copyrighter although it doesn’t have an option screen.

Support

This plugin is not supported.