The Daily Ping

The 1st Ping was published on January 6, 2000.

August 10th, 2008

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Boy, this Ping will have a small audience.

A few weeks ago I started noticing that my Consumerist RSS feed wasn’t showing all images for all posts. Some? Sure. Others? I get this message: “The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.”

If you check out the actual entry, you’ll see nothing special about the image. It’s just a JPG or GIF or PNG or what-have-you. So why is this happening?

I haven’t discovered the exact reason yet. It’s definitely coming from the feed, though, and not from my RSS reader. The conspiracy theorist in me says it’s a cheap way for AOL (who owns Consumerist) to get people to view ads on the resulting page. There’s no technical reason I can think of for doing this.

Ironically, Consumerist is the type of blog that would deal with an issue like this. Opps.

Posted in Technology

Ryan August 11, 2008, 1:47 am

I’ve noticed that as well and just figured it was used for particularly large images. If they’re using it to suck people into their advertising, that’s really lame.

What is this then?

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