A Recent Post as Seen on Lifehacker
A Recent DCoT Post as Seen on Lifehacker

As many of you know from a previous post, I use Google Alerts to monitor the Internet for different activity pertaining to Daily Cup of Tech. While I was looking through the alerts from last night, I came across something that looked a bit odd. There was a link referencing my From the Files of DCoT… category on the blog. This category was embedded into an URL from Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/all/from-the-files-of-dcot%27%27%27/).

With my interest peaked piqued (thanks Joe), I decided to do some investigation. I clicked on the link and discovered, basically, an empty page. But, I kept digging. What I found was that Lifehacker has essentially three main areas to the blog: popular, front, and all.

Popular and front are your basic blog areas with popular being (duh!) the most popular posts and front being their regular blog front page. It is the all page that gets interesting.

Thanks BarryThe all page is a combination of posts from Lifehacker and select other blogs on the Internet. It appears that they pull RSS feed summaries from these other blogs, strip out the HTML (which explains why their version of my Thanks Barry post looks to be a bit odd), and then repost them in summary format on their website. The posts do not show up in their regular RSS feeds.

I am assuming that this is an automated process because some of the “errors” that I am seeing would not have gotten past a human. If this is the case, it is a pretty sophisticated script or program because it grabs the category (or at least the first one on the page), the website, the post date, and the post title. It also strips out (most) HTML and find inline images which are reprocessed and used as thumbnails.

I have to admit that I am flattered that they are syndicating my RSS feed on their website, practically verbatim. And, I appear to be in pretty good company. Here are some of the other blogs that they are reposting:

I don’t know this for certain but I think this is still something that they are working on and I am assuming it is still in beta. It looks like there are some bugs to be worked out yet (the odd looking posts, some links not working quite right, etc.) but I still think it is pretty cool that they believe DCoT has something to offer their readers!

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Tim Fehlman