I’ve noticed a lot of old articles keep reappearing in my training posts. Have authors started republishing their posts over and over again? Maybe curators are grabbing them and republishing the whole thing?
It turns out the culprit is twitter. If you are using a twitter search as a feed, you will run into this problem.
The training capabilities of MyCurator are a great way to find and prioritize the best content for your site. The little green thumbs up and red thumbs down give you a simple way to provide feedback about which articles you like or don’t like. These ‘thumbs’ are what we refer to as the training tags. You may also see them on your live site, and this article talks about when they show up and how to hide them.
Images are a very gray area right now. Its clear you don’t want to copy original, ‘owned’ images. But how do you tell? I have come across only a few ‘watermarked’ images that display an owner out of thousands.
If you are properly attributing the original post, then you are also attributing where the image came from if you curated that post on to your site. Anyone following the attribution will see the original image on the original site. At this point I think this covers most use cases and have not heard of anyone having a problem with it. You could even make it more specific by using an attribution link such as “See original post and this image at: ” (MyCurator allows you to customize your attribution link).
If you have a lot of sources for MyCurator to discover content for curation, you may find that you can end up with 100’s or articles per week in your training pages. If this goes on for months or years, will it swamp your site and slow it to a crawl? The simple answer is no, we’ve built in several features to MyCurator so that article volume in your training page shouldn’t affect your blog.
The articles collected by MyCurator are stored in a custom post type. While they are stored in the main wp_posts data table, there is an index on post type so that your live site will easily ignore the training articles when it looks for posts to display. The impact of the content collected by MyCurator should be minimal on the display of articles on your main site.
We also have an auto-delete process that removes all of the collected training articles after x days. You can change the number of days, default is 7, in the Admin tab of the MyCurator Options menu. This will clean out the unused articles automatically if you never curate them into a post. In addition, when the training posts are removed, all of the pictures attached to them are removed. This feature will keep your the storage used by the training posts to a reasonable level.
We also have bulk tools in the Training Posts menu item in the dashboard that allow you to delete multiple articles, just like the Posts menu item. These allow you to clean up the unused articles as needed.
The best way to ensure you are curating content responsibly is to just use an excerpt of the original article and display the original article link right in the summarized post. This is the standard default of MyCurator and is set when the option “Show original article link, not readable page?” is checked. It is also best to add some of your own content, such as comments, ideas and opinions to each curated post. Over time, as you react to articles you have curated, you should find that you are writing more of your own content. This may be lengthier comments and reactions. You may also find you are writing more original content as the curated content provides inspiration and ideas.
To do content curation right, you have to follow the golden rule of attribution, attribution, attribution. MyCurator automatically creates an attribution link for each article it finds. You can format this link to make it work for your site. We’ll cover the elements that you can control when formatting your attribution link.
First, MyCurator looks at the attribution link as two parts, an intro text and the actual link. The actual link is called the anchor and is the part that you click on and it takes you to the source of the article.