I tweaked the post byline a little bit. What was one long line that (on most screen sizes) would wrap into several lines, is now two separate lines. Category and tag links now appear on a second line beneath the other meta information.

I was starting to get annoyed by the fact that the addition of tags would always wrap the comment link onto the next line. Differing numbers and length of tags were making it so the comment link never appeared in exactly the same place twice. That blows. If having to look for the comment link annoyed me, I'm pretty sure it annoyed you twice as much.

So yeah, that's fixed. The first byline will basically always remain the same length, so the comment link will be in the same spot on every post. Much better, I think.

I'm also experimenting with adding a fingerprint to my site feed, which is the real reason for this post. I'm sure you would have noticed and adapted to the byline change without me pointing it out. But I need a new post to test the feed settings.

The feed now has a footer containing two paragraphs. The first paragraph, the one I want visible, is:

© Some rights reserved. Licensed by Creative Commons.

Be a pal and please let me know if your feed reader displays that paragraph, the hidden paragraph after it, neither or both.

According to Dante, Hell is divided into nine circles. Different sins merit different circles and each circle is more torturous than the last. The ninth and final circle is for the traitorous, the worst of all sinners.

It's been 700 years since Dante's death and sin has evolved. To meet the expanding needs of the modern world, I propose we add a tenth circle for the sinners of the digital age: spyware merchants, virus writers, phishers, spammers, sploggers and (my new extra special favorites) scrapers.

Are you familiar with feed scraping? Scraping is using someone's site feed to generate content for another site. Because of the way feed aggregators tend to work, the scraping process can be completely automated. There are professional software packages designed specifically for automated scraping; just add feeds and the software does all the work.

For example, last month I stumbled onto a WordPress plugin that looked interesting. The plugin author's site was almost entirely devoted to Google AdSense. I soon learned that the whole blog was geared toward getting other people to write content so the blog owner could insert AdSense ads, and essentially use other people's work to get paid.

I eagerly accepted the opportunity and wrote a post about using CSS to block AdSense. Always ready to pat myself on the back, I wrote a post here about my cleverness.

My post on Dominique's blog was not scraping, but rather something of a guest post. However, the post I wrote here was scraped. This guy republished it. Apparently I used that magic word (AdSense) and my post got snagged to appear in his scrape blog. I was, and still am, entertained by the whole thing. He republished my post about a post about defeating AdSense, and he put it on his AdSense blog. This entertained me so much, I even de-spammed his pingback.

It's definitely scraping, but what he did isn't that bad. He only publishes excerpts, he properly attributes the original author and he links to the original post. His practice is a little shifty, but it could be a lot worse.

Worse like the dickheads at Bitacle. Just today I learned that Bitacle is scraping my feed on a regular basis. They scrape so regularly, they've now republished 285 posts. 285. Fuckers.

That's just outright theft. So let's have some fun with the shitheads at Bitacle. There's a somewhat disreputable tech trick called cloaking. Cloaking is normally used to cheat search engines by providing one set of content to the search engine and a completely different set of content to web surfers.

Right now I have Bitacle banned. But I really want to cloak their asses and set them up to harvest fake content. But then, what to put in the feed? And here I ask for your assistance, witty, clever people that you are. What should I put in the fake feed?