Good morning, children! I come to you with two bits of site-related housekeeping that must be taken care of for the greater good of all MamaPopdom. So sit back, relax, and let the site bidness flow around you, enveloping you in the warm, freshly-peed-in-pool feeling of serenity that only interweb administration BS can bring:
1. Our MamaPop Spring 2009 opinion poll is now FINIS. You the people have spoken, and what's clear is that, on average, you want A WHOLE LOT MORE Celebrity News & Gossip, a bit more TV News & Recaps and Books & Print related coverage, and that you secondarily have a fair amount of interest in Movies and Current Affairs. But CELEBRITY NEWS & GOSSIP!!!! We hear you. And we will begin steering the good ship MamaPop to be more aligned with the wants and needs of you, the MamaPop reading public. BECAUSE WE LOVE.
2. You may have noticed (and been annoyed by!) MamaPop's recent RSS feed conversion from full to partial content. Sigh. There's a reason for this. Last week it was brought to our attention that at least one site -- a fairly prominent one at that -- was running MamaPop's full feed as content on their site without our permission. It's called "scraping," and as obviously wrong as it may seem, it's unfortunately very difficult to prosecute when the scraper gives credit to the site of origin (in this case, the offending site had a small button version of our logo and a link to our homepage at the bottom of each post, just before the comments, though individual author bylines were omitted. Regardless, we'd never seen any hits from the site, and the comments sections on our posts there were very active -- clearly readers weren't recognizing or didn't care that these posts came from somewhere else, and were responding to them as though they were original content generated by that site. And UGH.).
Needless to say, this left all of us at MamaPop a bit peeved. All the MamaPop writers work really hard to bring fresh, smart, funny, interesting content to our site, and they deserve attribution and recognition for that hard work. The only way to ensure that scrapers can't continue doing this -- stealing our original content and posting it as their own -- is to go partial feed. And I know it sucks. And believe me, I agonized about doing it. But for now it's the only solution, and we have no other viable option at this point to protect ourselves. Sorry, dudes.
So that's all the haps. As always, if you have any questions about MamaPop, or suggestions for us, feel free to shoot us an email anytime at contact@mamapop.com
Thank you come again!