A bit shorter from now on...

I can't remember if I posted this photo already... Not sure where those fabric patches are going either.

Anyway. I am a bit vexed that I have to write this post and even more because of what I have to write. From now on the feed for the blog will not be the full thing. I am very sad to do this, because personally I very much prefer getting the full feed from blogs in my feed reader.

I am really sorry to have to do this, and I hope that you won't abandon the blog because of it.

The reason I am doing this is that the site Dreamwidth.org gives its users a 'reading' page which pulls the feed of blogs the user subscribes to. And a Dreamwidth user is subscribing to my blog, so the whole content of my blog is published on this page. It does link back to the individual posts, however, it is still publishing my content, words and pictures, without my permission.

Now, if it was just a short bit of each post I might not be so vexed by this, but as I said, it's the whole shebang. Or if it had been a private page, like in a feed reader. But it's not. And I have a problem with that.


Frankly, I find it worrying that Dreamwidth allows this sort of thing. As I read their own TOS it is actually breaching those very TOS. So it is kinda puzzling. I have contacted them about it and I hope they actually respond to my email. But who knows.

I would contact the user, who is subscribing to my content, to simply ask that they would remove my feed from their page, but there is no way of messaging the person without a Dreamwidth account and I do not have one - you need an invitation! So to that user, I am flattered that you like my blog and want it on your 'reading' page. And I am sure you don't mean any harm but please remove my feed, so I can continue to publish the full feed of my blog. Besides, there are better ways to subscribe to blogs, like Google Reader for example.

You might think, oh why even bother to waste time and energy on this.. well... it is my content, I spend a lot of time writing and taking pictures etc for it. I know, the users are not exactly passing it off as their own content, but the fact of the matter is that they do not have permission to publish my content. Even with 'attribution'.

I have no illusions that I can keep my content 'protected' from publishing by others, whether innocently or for nefarious purposes. But I do believe that we ought to speak up for our content and where it ends up. For sure, noone will care if we don't say anything.

Thank you for understanding.


Thank you, Mims. :-)