This is a neato trick that you can either pay a lot of money for RSS2Blog to achieve, or do for free.

I prefer free.

Here are a couple of examples of blogs
I set up in the last couple of days that use autoposting of RSS feeds to provide relevant keyword and LSI content.

http://socialnetworking.knowhow-now.com/blog
and
http://mentalillness.blogfeeder.org/health

If you look at the calendar you can see they are nicely ‘aged’ with posts going back, in one case, about a year. (the blog did not exist until yesterday!)

The static content goes in as pages on the right and I’ll be doing some ‘real’ posts as well.

The magic pixiedust is provided by virtue of a plugin I found on my search for an autoblogger that would relieve me of the chore of setting up a cron job.

http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2006/06/06/wp-autoblog-a-syndication-plugin/

This little beauty will automatically scan your RSS feeds for new content and then update your site with it. But that is not all:
You can choose full or partial posts
You can choose how often the toy will scan for new content
You can choose to attribute posts or not
You can do automated find and replace, so that if a feed has a consistent text coming through, you can replace them with different text.
Also, keywords can then trigger an affiliate link insertion where none existed before…

One mixed blessing, it also passes through categories. The mental illness site I set up has a Flickr feed running. ALL the tags that folks use for their pics come through and I have to manually remove some of them. I might replace the categories with a tag cloud widget which should give the benefit of tags as keywords but not look so damn ugly.

So, that is it.

I love it!

There are some others a little more polished, but this one has the functionality down.

I have worked with RSStoBlog and have found that I prefer to use this plugin with some other toys for its functionality. But the ‘big boy’ app is nicer in that I can do everything from a central control panel: one panel, multiple blogs.

If you don’t want to use an expensive blogging tool, then this one is really the dog’s danglies!

The way it works with a built in plugin called WP-cron to give the slight degree of randomness is just way cute and it is so easy to set the feeds up with new keywords.

It’ll never be perfect at keeping all the posts relevant, but it can be pretty good. I set up a site dealing with comics (the graphic literature, not comedians) and a few posts slip through about funny guys. The main problem comes when the thing is loading up the ‘aged’ posts, then one has to go through and remove the duff stuff. After that it is, seemingly, just a case of a quick delve through every few days, if one bothers at all.

I am thinking that a Wordpress article uploader, a datafeed parser (some free, others $90 and up) and WPautoblogger (free) plus a few free support widgets and plugins is pretty close to autoblogging cash generating nirvana!

A question was asked about pinging of articles - the questioner was worried about a whole load of pings hitting the ping sites all at once. Here is my reply:

The ping list is activated with each post. What I do is to remove the ping list as I am populating the site and then when the site is ‘aged’ with old posts I replace it so that as current posts arrive they are then pinged.

Another couple of small issues in respect of the choice of feeds:
1)You can choose to turn off attribution in the setup, I think that you should leave it on,e ven though it costs you an outgoing link, it is fair and right to give credit for the words that you are using -the author has chosen to make his posts public as a form of advertising. IMHO a link is a small price to pay!

2)You might want to consider NOT using Google’s feeds. They are set up such that the link to the source always goes through a Google URL, thus Google can always know when and where a Google syndicated source was used. I don’t like that.

Over time I have built up a little arsenal of plugins for use in my blogs. Usually I install all of them but I may not use all of them all the time. I’ll fill in the details for the others as time goes by and add new ones as I install and decide to keep them.

WP-Cron This provides a fake cron facility so you do not need to set up a cron job with your host control panel.

All the WP-Cron stuff below is part of the same package, but if you use WP-Autoblog below then you MUST remove WP-Cron itself from the WP-Cron plugin folder. Autoblog already incorporates WP-Cron in its folder. The only one of these that I use actively is WP-Cron Future Pings as this one stops WP from pinging items with a future date from being pinged at the time they are uploaded which is normal WP practice.

WP-Cron Dashboard

WP-Cron Moderation

WP-Cron Reminder

WP-Cron-Mail

WP-Cron Future Pings

WP-Cron UpdateLinks

WP-Cron Gravatar Cache

Search Meter The Search Meter Plugin will automatically record what people are searching for and what they are finding on your website in your search box on the blog. You can find all the report in your admin interface.

Google Ad Wrap This plugin places Adsense tags top and bottom of content and comment text increasing the relevance and focus of any Adsense units used on the page.

WordPress Affiliate Pro A newly released plugin that makes life very cool and easy for autoblogging affiliate bloggers. Inserts links, tracks clicks, masks links and more. Great tool. Absolutely indispensible for bloggers who are also monetising their sites with affiliate programs. It is the details that set this one apart from the rest!

Google Adsense widget Makes Adsense modules for sidebars. Works with the Widgets Plugin. Specifically for Google Adsense blocks. Up to 4 instances of this widget may exist (since Google only allows 3 ads and one link block on a page). Heavily derived from the Text widget code included with the widget plugin by Automattic, Inc.

Sidebar Widgets Allows users to run little WP gadgets called Widgets, dead useful. Install this and then you can use all the fun widget stuff

Google Search widget Adds a sidebar widget to let users search your site with Google.

adsenseBeautifier Add pretty little pictures next to your Adsense modules. Works with Adsense Deluxe so I don’t use it. But I would…

StatCounter for WordPress Adds the StatCounter invisible counter code to the footer of each page of your WP site. Configure it from the Options page.

Filosofo Uncheck Default Category Unchecks the default category when you select another.

Zap_NewWindow If you want external links (links that refer to other domains) in your weblog opening in a new browser window use this plugin. So you don’t have to type target=”_blank” yourself for every link. Zap_NewWindow automatically detects an external link and will open it in a new browser window. Furthermore using Zap_NewWindow the code is valide to “XHTML strict”.

Link Library Provides a way to create a link page from the data entered in the links section of the admin area. Displays links with large descriptions, a list of all link categories at the top of the page and a way to replace the description with the notes field since the notes field is longer and is contents are not displayed in the links admin page.

Subscribe me

IImage Browser

Google Sitemaps

AutoMeta automatically generates and includes HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. Technorati picks up tags from your blog’s feed so nothing for you to do. Tag selection can be done manually or left completely to the software.

ArticleTrader Easy Post

Adsense Injection

WPvideo

Filosofo Home-Page Control

WP-Autoblog

Adsense-Deluxe

Google Analytics

Google Adsense for Feeds

Spam Karma 2

WordPress Database Backup

Sociable

No Ping Wait Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php The server with the download seems not to be working right now. I hope the owner will not mind me posting the code for the plugin here:

code text

To use simply save as a .php file with the name nopingwait.php and place in your plugins folder.

<?php

/*
Plugin Name: No Ping Wait
Plugin URI: http://somethingunpredictable.com/wp-no-ping-wait/
Description: Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php
Author: Robert Deaton
Author URI: http://somethingunpredictable.com/
Version: 2.0
*/
remove_action(’publish_post’, ‘generic_ping’);
add_action(’publish_post’, ‘masq_set_generic_ping’);
function masq_set_generic_ping() {
update_option(’masq_generic_ping_waiting’, 1);
}
if(strstr($_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’], ‘execute-pings.php’) !== FALSE && get_option(’masq_generic_ping_waiting’)) {
update_option(’masq_generic_ping_waiting’, 0);
generic_ping();
}
?>

One of those little torments is when we have posts in categories that just don’t suit. Usually I simply leave them, it is too much trouble to change them. But now there is a choice, it works under WP2.0+ and allows for speedy category editing.

 Download from: http://uwmike.com/wordpress/wp-cats/

What does it do?

WP-Cats augments the Manage Posts screen with Ajax controls that allow two-click adding and single-click removing of categories from individual posts.

If a post is tagged with only Uncategorized, this tag will be removed when any other is added.

Now there’s no excuse not to keep things tidy.