Getting Images to Display in a FeedBurner Feed and Some Hasty Thoughts on Free Software

I’m trying out FeedBurner for managing my feeds and for email subscriptions. (See: New! In the right sidebar under the syndication links.) It was pretty easy to start using with the help of this WordPress FeedBurner plugin for redirecting the RSS and Atom feeds to FeedBurner. My initial impression of their service is very positive. The only problem I’ve had is that images don’t show up in the feed anymore, because I’m using relative paths and they need to be absolute. (That was most noticeable at first. I’ve since realized that internal links were broken also.)

I contacted FeedBurner support and I think Matt Shobe must have been responding to me even before I clicked the “submit” button, as if they have a support time machine to be extra responsive. He pointed out I should use absolute paths to fix that. But! But! That would be painful — we hates the absolute pathses, Precious. I thought it was something that FeedBurner should do for me and I mentioned that in a reply.

In the meantime, while I waited for a reply (their time machine must have went forward by accident), I kept digging. I expected to find all kinds of web pages discussing this but my searches weren’t turning up much. (This is part of my motivation for this post, to get some more keywords out there for future searches. I live to serve.)

WordPress Plugin, Anyone?

I began to think it wouldn’t be that hard to make a WordPress plugin to convert relative to absolute paths in the feed. It should be simple, but would probably take me a fair amount of time to figure out. I don’t really know WordPress or PHP, I just tinker with settings and work from examples when I want to tweak things. I didn’t want to spend that time, although it would be satisfying to have a solution that I could share with others, and I do enjoy playing with WordPress. But I searched some more, because in this case I didn’t want to solve a problem that already had answers.

And! I found a discussion from last December in the WordPress support forums where Robert Accettura asked about this, mentioning that we of course want to use relative paths, but that for a feed to validate it should have absolute paths. This was my first hint that it was my problem and not FeedBurner’s fault that I wasn’t giving them absolute paths. Anyway, a couple of posts later, Robert reported that he solved his own problem and created a simple WordPress plugin for translating relative paths to absolute paths in the feed. (He also pointed to a helpful FEED Validator page with an explanation of the issue.)

It’s so awesome how you can find a WordPress plugin to do just about anything.

The plugin was very simple but it solved the problem in my test version of WordPress after I published a new post to force the local feed to update. So that’s what this post is all about. I didn’t want to publish a throwaway post in “production” so this is a more elaborate test post to force my FeedBurner feed to update. Although, in the time it’s taken to write this, it updated anyway, so now I’m posting this purely for altruistic reasons of wanting to help my fellow man and woman.

Free Software / GPL

I can also take the opportunity to talk about free software. Robert released his plugin under the GNU General Public License. I just love to see GPL’ed software. Here is someone saying they believe in freedom and sharing.

Some might say, big deal, it’s just a few lines of code. Anyone could do that. Maybe, but it would take time for people to learn how to do it, and while that may be a valuable exercise, it’s not the best solution for everyone to learn how to do every job and then do it. That’s why we have civilization and specialization. And that’s what free software enables us to do so much more easily: specialize and share the fruits of that specialization.

It shouldn’t be a big deal to share like this, should it? It should be natural. And it is for many people. But many people have this desire to own ideas. Again, thinking of how simple the code is, it would be annoying to find someone who did something similar and published it, but said, “All rights reserved.” Maybe they’ll deign to let you use it, but put some kind of restriction on it. Like you can’t go out and make a million bucks on this thing that took a few hours for them to create. Not to be ungrateful, but it’s not like the thing couldn’t be created without them.

And it’s not to say their time isn’t worth anything, but why should they have the right to control how others use this work that can be copied without depriving them of its use? (I’ll throw that out there but then back off. This is a big topic to be discussed in the area of how intellectual work differs from physical property. I can understand why people might think the creator should have some say over their creation, but I don’t believe this is true if they willingly publish it–even to one person–and the creation can be copied with no marginal cost. The question is how will people get paid for their efforts. I want to paid for my efforts and I want other people to be paid for their efforts, but if it upsets the entire existing applecart to do something as radical as remove copyrights and patents and the resulting digital restrictions management that rise up to protect them, then so be it. Software patents, at least, have to go. There are better reasons for patents in the case of pharmaceuticals, but that’s another area I should be careful about wandering in to.)

It gets even more annoying if someone is able to patent the idea of using a plugin to modify URLs for the purposes of syndication. And that’s the kind of thing the patent office routinely approves in patents. So now this person who invested a few hours of their time can interfere with millions of other people who could have created the same thing if and when confronted with the same problem, but now we’ve given the first person a monopoly on this thing. To what end? For what benefit to society? They didn’t do anything that wouldn’t have gotten done anyway.

I’m talking about a simple thing, in this instance, but it can apply to more complicated software also, of course. People are going to make things with or without patent protection, so why stifle competition?

Ok. That was kind of ranty and written in a hurry because I didn’t intend for this to be a long post. But I think I’ll push it out anyway, because I’d like to publish more and maybe that means I won’t be able to always spend as much time refining my thoughts. I’ll leave it to the comments section for people to tell me how dumb I’m being and how ill-considered my opinions are. I welcome the discussion.

In conclusion to this part, it’s great to see software released under the GPL. I know I can take it and use it and there is no question it’s ok, as long as I share it in turn if I distribute a modified version. Which I would be thrilled to do. And there’s no further say on what I can or can’t do with it. I appreciate Robert’s help–I just dropped a couple of dollars in his Amazon tip jar–but it wouldn’t be right if he was able to tell me what I can do with the bits that are now on my computer. And the open-sourceness of it is great. People always talk about how the benefit of free/open-source software is that you can study the code to see what it does. This is often impractical for one person, as in the case of the Linux kernel, for example, but I like that I can review WordPress plugins before using them to see what they’re doing.

Links

As I think about feeds and email subscriptions and printouts and all the ways that web pages are used, I wonder what to do about URLs. If you link naturally in your sentences by turning terms “like this” into links, it reads nice in HTML while showing the availability of other information, but that information is lost in plain text printouts and emails. So do I want to include a links section for at least the key links? Like this:

I don’t know.

Coming Soon…

This post was an unplanned pregnancy and birth. I’ll be resuming next with the promotional build-up to the publication of my science fiction short story.