How to set up an auto-posting blog

This is something I have seen come up in comments on various webmaster and blogging related forums, but have never really paid much attention to until now.  Today, I decided I would set one up if only to see whether I can learn a little extra about WordPress and blogging.

A year ago, I registered a domain about an upcoming pop star.  I ended up with the .net and the .info domain.  I have used the .info variant for a fan site but the .net domain sat unused for a year.  This is the domain I shall use.

Stage one: install WordPress and standard plugins

WordPress installation is straightforward so I shall not go in to that. (There is plenty of information about that over on the official WordPress site.)  Next come the standard plugins.  For most blogs, these will include:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adsense-manager/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-no-duplicate/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-plugin-library/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popular-posts-plugin/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recent-posts-plugin/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress-reloaded/

and perhaps a few more.

Stage two: look at auto post plugins

There are two free plugins that allow you to pull in content via RSS feeds and publish it on a blog:  FeedWordPress and WP-o-Matic.  Each has its benefits and disadvantages.

WP-o-Matic relies on the simplepie core.  Although a version of this is included, you can also download it as a separate plugin to remain current.  Fully automating WP-o-Matic relies on setting up a unix cron job to run the script periodically.  This isn’t difficult but if you plan on using this plugin to set up an autoposting blog then be sure to check that your host allows you to set up and manage jobs via a scheduler.  WP-o-Matic also uses the cURL libraries which like cron are usually standard features on most hosting packages.

FeedWordPress relies on the bog standard RSS feed pulling tools packaged with WordPress and also seems to use WordPress inherent scheduler to run. FeedWordPress also has a sister plugin that filters duplicate content – this can be very useful when pulling from one or more feed syndication sites, or single large syndicated feed sites that carry many versions of the same story.

WP-o-Matic offers a very powerful additional tool that I found useful.  It permits you to set up  a series of regular expression rules to apply to feed content.  This means you are able to “find and replace” certain phrases or words within the pulled content. For this reason, I chose WP-o-Matic to drive my auto blog.

Stage three: finding content

Once the blog is set up, the final stage is to pull in public domain content. This can be found at various article directories, although depending on your blog niche you might have to seach further afield. Popular niches such as finance, health, celebrities and electronics goods are relatively easy to find feed content for.

If you use feed syndication sites (like Google News or Yahoo! News), then be aware that auto blog plugins will not pull in the full content of stories but only the extract used by the syndication service. Also be sure to adhere to any copyright notices.

Although it has been only several days since I set up this first auto blog, the immediate results have been quite impressive with XX unique/day traffic flowing in right away.  Whether this remains we shall have to see and perhaps might be worthy of a follow up post.