Why: I collect ‘How To’ information like some people collect recipes. I use to purchase how to books, but in some cases the internet has rendered them outdated almost as soon as they are purchased. I started collecting this information and found that internet ‘blogs’ are a great way to organize my collection. A blog is a form of website that features a database format and ‘gadgets’ that are ideal for organizing, indexing, and accessing information. I started converting these “How To’s” into a private website in 2008. As the internet collection grew (Presently at 64 articles) I realized that not only was a blog/website a great way for me to view my collection, it was also a great way of sharing this information. Thus, this website and “Glenn’s Recipes” website were made public. The one drawback to making the website public is that you need constant updating for it to be useful to
other people, but posting a new article on a regular basis is quite a task, which is why the “Some of My HoW2 Resources” section exist.
What: A “News Feed” gadget provides a website (such as About.com) with a way of sharing its information with another website (such as this one) on a real time basis by sending a summary of an article whenever a new article is published. Whenever a new summary is received the receiving website’s gadget 
How: The news feed gadgets on this website are set up to present summaries from About.com and other websites. The sending websites icon, name, article title and a summary are presented, all linked back to the sending website so that the viewer can see the full article just by clicking on its title. They are automatically listed with the newest article at the top of the gadget and the oldest at the bottom. They are also presented with a time stamp showing how old the article is. This way viewers can quickly determine which websites have published a new article since their last visit here.
Why I’m dropping About.com:
- The purpose of the “Some of My HoW2 Resources” section is to provide visitors to this page/website with continuous updates of articles from chosen websites so they can see new summaries and decide if they want to explore that article. This serves to provide the websites users with continuous fresh information in addition to the articles I publish on a less regular basis. Most websites use the news feed gadget to list their most recent article. The About.com, on the other hand uses their gadget to list their most popular article. This means that a very popular article would be all we see from them for an undetermined length of time, which defeats our purpose for including them on our websites (most other websites provide a list of their most popular articles for you to view once you arrive at their website, as does this website see “Most Popular Post (30days)” below.
- This method is not unethical, but is counter productive, but it is their choice. On the other hand it does not serve our purpose. What is most popular on their website might no be of concern on another website. When I see an article on their website that may be of importance to user’s of this website I publish it here (such as this article) with a link to the original website article. By publishing it here we have a permanent record and link to the article.
- What is unethical, or at least their use of the feed gadget that is not made clear, is that even though the article they are sharing may be weeks old they “refresh” the article everyday so that it stays at the top of our feed gadget and falsely time stamps the article as ‘new’.
By falsely time stamping the article to appear as new it moves articles that are newer, but from other websites, down our “Some of My HoW2 Resources” section. This is distracting to those who realize it, and confusing to those who don’t realize what’s going on. Leading many to believe that the indicated newest article is one they’ve already seen so they assume they’ve already seen the articles below.
If anyone wishes to visit the About.com website on their own use this link: http://www.about.com/ just click it. I will gladly reinstate the About.com feeds if they ever correct their feeds setup.
Do you have a favorite How To or Recipe website that you’d like to share? just email me or leave a comment. (click the comment link in the gray section below.)
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