Although it is essential that you publish an RSS feed for your blog, as it is one of the most popular ways for people to view your content, it is also an unfortunate fact that people can use your feed to steal your work. There are many blogs out there, which use simple methods to republish your feed on their own blog, completely unattributed and without permission - blog scrapers.

WordPress users can fight back against this though with a simple plugin. As yet, there is no way to prevent them actually taking the feed, but this plugin will add a simple legal message to the bottom of every post along with a hyperlink to your site.

This is what it generates for me:

This message is easily customised, and even if no-one ever emails you about it, the hyperlink will tell you via Technorati who’s using your link, and will at least give you some attribution.

Many thanks to Angsuman Chakraborty, author of the Copyright Plugin.