It had already been foreseen, now it’s happening for real:
Jason Calacanis: “In case you didn’t notice, some of your favorite Weblogs, Inc. blogs now have Google Adsense in the RSS feeds.”
However, if you’re clicking an AdSense ad appearing in an RSS feed, like TUAW’s, in NetNewsWire, you get the following error message (assuming you have it configured to open pages in its embedded browser):
One reason you may not be able to access this advertiser’s website is because your web browser or email application is not configured to accept cookies. Cookies are small bits of text that websites place on visitors’ computers to identify that they have visited a site previously. To access the site, you’ll need to follow the steps below to set your browser or email application to accept cookies.
The moment this feature is available to all the publishers, I will probably revert to publishing a full RSS feed, with ads. Frankly, if I can make a little money with ads, after I have covered hosting fees, I won’t complain. One problem with this is that my feed is aggregated in places like Planet Apache, which is not too picky with HTML code it digests and regurgitates.
Indeed, if you happen too publish a truncated RSS feed and by chance an entry gets truncated after an opening tag (<em> for example), but before the corresponding closing tag, everything that follows will be italicized, in the example.
This probably means that it will happily display all the ads included in the RSS feeds it syndicates. Some people have already indicated that they wouldn’t accept this, and I fully understand this sentiment. It wouldn’t be fair for my ads to be carried by a community site like Planet Apache.
While it could be argued that this is a bug of Planet Apache (other aggregators, like javablogs.com for instance, sanitize all HTML code before republishing it), I’d better investigate if WordPress can be configured to produce both an ad-free, summarized feed and an ad-carrying full feed at the same time. Besides being nice to Planet Apache, this solution would give more choice to all of my readers who use an aggregator. What do you think?
A with ads and without ads feed sounds like an excellent idea. A better long-term solution may be to add support for authentication to the planet aggregator so that only authorized planets get the ad-free feed otherwise everyone would just subscribe to the ad-free feed. I guess the other option is a full-post feed with ads and a summary-only feed without ads. Then people can take their pick.
Thanks for considering my adophobic tendencies.
I probably should put some effort in and start looking at writing plugins/patches etc to provide premade options for people as this is likely to become a big issue in the next few months.