Just a quick note regarding the recent changes to the site.
It is a little unfortunate that there are people out there who want to steal content, rather than just asking nicely first, but oh well. On the bright side, I guess my content must be worth something if people feel compelled to steal it. So in light of this, I’ve made a few changes to my site to protect against content theft and do apologise to my readership if it has affected your experience so far:
Copyright Pro I have disabled right-clicking on my site, you can cut and paste text, but not photographs. Basically, this is in place so that when someone wants to use my work that they let me know about it first, before blindly cutting it out which constitutes as stealing, and I frown upon that.
Image watermarks I don’t actually like watermarking images because I feel it takes away from the immersion and had resisted watermarking for nearly as long as I have been blogging, but alas, I have given in. When restaurants are lifting my images, it’s getting abit silly.
RSS feeds and Emails I have been trying to find a way around this, I know alot of you would like the full rss email reinstated, and I have to admit it is convenient having entire blog posts delivered to your inbox via email, but this is also the main method which pirate websites (such as steak-restaurant.co.cc) are using to steal my content wholesale. So my apologies guys, if you know a more secure method for me to send you my stuff, I will implement it, but till then, all RSS emails will only show a summary of the blog post.
Newsletter emails are not affected. Ditto really.
The New Homepage Do you like it so far? I have a new slider feature that displays the latest posts. Also a java-enabled comments widget is a self-contained comments database viewer thing, which has nav buttons that can display the entire history of all the comments on this website, it is quite slick in my opinion and its a convenient place to read comments I feel.
New restaurant write-ups are due tomorrow, Michael Nadra to be exact. Stay tuned.
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good ideas, really sad it had to be done though ;(
Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes stealing content from the internet will be able to steal images regardless of right-click disable, I’d be surprised if it makes much difference at all. Therefore, the watermarking makes a lot of sense.
Perhaps you can also drop a tiny font caption up the right hand vertical edge of each image (where it shouldn’t impact viewing much) advising that people can contact you directly to discuss use of non-watermarked copies of your images.
Best of luck
Kavey
Oh man, that’s such a shame. A bit of a hidden compliment. Liking the new homepage
there’ll be a paywall next!
only kidding. these changes won’t detract from the overall quality of your site
For what it’s worth… I almost never leave my RSS feed reader. It’s extremely rare that I do and that unfortunately means I won’t be reading many of your posts. I’ve greatly appreciated your posts to date, but I don’t have the time or the patience to open each of your posts in its own tab.
I’m not familiar with how people are pulling your content from the feed and piping it into their own, but if it’s an automatic process you could include some text in your posts stating where it came from and just format it as white text on the site. No one looking at the site will see it but when it’s copy/pasted it’ll show up on the site stealing your content. Again, no idea whether it would work in practice, but I’d much prefer you find another option other than cutting the RSS feeds, because normally when a site starts doing that I end up removing the feed because it’s not actually providing me any value.
Also, one complaint about the lack of right-click… I now can’t right-click on a link and open it in a new tab. So if I’m reading through a post, want to click a link… I can’t. Also, I’m pretty sure anyone who wants to stead your content by copy/paste methods would just grab it from your page source.
Just some thoughts. I know they’re selfish but these changes make the site unusable (for me).
Bob,
Thanks for your response, have responded to you on email as well. I have re-enabled right clicking for the time being, and the white text idea sounds good to me, will try it over the next few posts and get back to you on this.
Long term, I’d like to get the full RSS feed back up and running again, just need to find a way to fingerprint them, and once I do that, will be able to distribute freely again.
Kang
Hi Kang,
It’s a real shame that this is happening, but i tend to agree with Bob. Put your URL in your images, put a disclaimer at the bottom of your RSS feed pointing them to your licensing page (you have one don’t you
), and hopefully that’ll be it – but really there’s no way to stop people pulling your content that is reliable, and most efforts will make it harder for genuine readers to participate.
good luck, keep up the fight, and most of all keep up the good work!
rob