This evening, I’ve made a change to the markwilson.it site feed (which, incidentally, makes me feel warm and fuzzy as I see more and more people subscribing – and is a good way to keep up with the stuff I post on this site). The change involved adding a footer to each item in the feed. It’s only short, I hope it won’t spoil your enjoyment of the content, and it looks something like this:

This blog post was written by Mark Wilson for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2004-2008 Mark Wilson and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. (What is this footer about?)

Why did I do this? Basically, it’s an attempt to make sure that where people scrape this site they don’t abuse the effort that I put into writing original content. The content here is copyrighted but I license it for non-commercial use, with attribution, as long as it is not altered or transformed in any way.

By including a footer which sets out where the original content can be found and highlighting the terms under which this content is offered (with a link explaining what the footer is about), I’m making it clear where the feed content originates from.

If you’ve come here by following a link from a site that is not the original source, please let me know.

In the spirit of Creative Commons, I should point out that I “stole” the idea from Merlin Mann, whose site at 43 Folders is much bigger and better than mine (I hope that this content is sufficiently original not to count as a derivative work) and that I use Sherief Mursyidi’s Feed Footer Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer WordPress plugin to make it happen.