What do you do when you’re itching to start a new blog but know good and well that you don’t have the time or resources to maintain a new blog? If you’re like me, you learn how to set up an automaic site.
That’s just what I did last week, when I was trying to figure out which current site of mine to focus on. I thought it would be something interesting to try out anyway.
I learned a few new things along the way, and thought I’d share them here. Here’s how I set up an automatic blog:
- The ethical debate - the first thing I had to do was decide just how I would set it up, and this brought several ethical questions to mind - the first being, “do I want to set up a site that’s comprised of other people’s work and will it be useful.” Then I thought about how the biggest sites out there are totally comprised of other people’s content - Google, MySpace, FaceBook, etc. - and they are very useful. So I decided that mine might be useful as well. Especially since I hand-pick what I feel to be the most interesting and relative blogs on my topic. The second ethical dilemma I faced was the question of how much content from other posts would I post on my new blog. I decided to go the safest route here and just post a snippet from other blog posts - I do have a problem with blogs that republish entire blog posts. Also, I made sure that all permalinks went to the original post. Now that that was out of the way, I had to decide on which program to use.
- Finding the right automating program - I looked into a few different options, including Planet Planet - a feed reader that ultimately looked too complicated to set up, Drupal - a CMS that I think can automate feeds and something I plan on looking into in the future but something that seemed to have too much for what I want, and FeedWordPress - which is what I ended up using. FeedWordPress is a WP plugin that serves as an RSS feed aggregator, and it ended up being the simplest one to use plus it had all of the features I wanted.
- The little, important details - First off, if you want your feeds to automatically go into the categories that the writer assigned them to, then make sure you install those ‘optional’ files. Then, go to ‘Plugins’ in the WP Dashboard and activate FeedWordPress. And finally, go through all of the sections in the WP interface to customize it to your liking.
- Adding feeds - find the blogs you want listed on yours, and place their URL in the “Syndicated” section under “Blogroll.” It should find any existing feeds for you. To publish them for the first time, go to …/wp-content/update-feeds.php and click “update.”
- Now this is a true gem: creating a cronjob in cpanel - the FeedWordPress site isn’t terribly helpful in telling you exactly what to do if you’re creating a cronjob in cpanel to have the feeds update atomatically. I searched high and low for this, and finally paid a programmer to tell me exactly what to put in that line in the cpanel cronjobs section, here it is:cd $HOME/www/wp-content ; php -q update-feeds.php
and you’ll need to put your path in there if it’s different. The rest of the cronjob interface is pretty self-explanatory - you just select how much you’d like to update it.
And that was it! Now I have this site that updates on its own every hour - how nice is that?!?
15 responses so far ↓
Jon // Apr 27, 2007 at 9:42 pm
I’ve been thinking about implementing an automatic blog as a feeder for my product site. I looked at RSS to Blog but it was $300+.
How do you find feeds in a particular niche?
Charles // May 7, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Hi Jon,
You could try typing in a niche keyword then “rss feed”, “rss” or “syndicate” into Google.
Jenn // May 7, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Hey, I just search for blogs - then the plugin has a section where you just put the blog URL in, and it gets the feed for you - it’s been pretty easy for me!
Shannon // Jul 10, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Yeah the ethical debate is a big thing. I wouldn’t want to rip off any fellow blogger by just syndicating their content, but I agree that some of the biggest and useful sites around are a colletion of other people’s content.
I’m assuming that if your site is not trying to hide the fact that this is other people’s content and links back to the original content, than the issue is not as questionable.
Have a great day,
Shannon
Jennifer // Jul 11, 2007 at 10:32 am
Yeah, it definitely linked back and I put a note up explaining the blog - but I did end up deleting it because it still seemed too weird.
Tyler // Jul 24, 2007 at 11:05 am
Jenn, when you got ready to update your feeds for the first time at yourdomain.com/wp-content/update-feeds.php, did you get this error message:
Error: I don’t syndicate tag:radgeek.com/projects/feedwordpress/ee8769
I thought it might be an issue with WP 2.2, but the same thing happened when I tried it with WP 2.1.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Jennifer // Jul 24, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Hi Tyler, no, sorry, I didn’t get an error at that point - let me know if you figure it out though.
Tyler // Jul 24, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Good news, I fixed it!
If anyone else has a similar problem, before you update your feeds, make sure you go to Blogroll>Syndicated and click “Find Feed” for each of the blogs you’ve added.
Jennifer // Sep 2, 2007 at 2:27 am
Thanks for the update, Tyler
Karolis // Sep 13, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Hey Jennifer,
I wanted to ask how did you managed FeedWordpress to post only a snippet of blog posts in your blog? I set everything up and and the plugin reposts almost full posts and I don’t want to do that. Thanks for any help.
cre()n // Oct 27, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Im in the same boat as karolis!
Jennifer // Oct 27, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Karolis and cre()n - I went into the main page of my blogs and replaced
< ?php the_content(__('Read more »'));?>
with
< ?php the_excerpt(__('Read more »'));?>
and this would solve that problem in most cases - every once in a while a feed would still publish the whole post, and in that case I would delete that feed all together.
Here’s an example of one of my auto sites: The Wedding Blogger
Jennifer // Dec 18, 2007 at 11:35 pm
By the way - I no longer use this at all - for one, I never got visitors on these sites, for two, it just kept bothering me.
Chris // Feb 3, 2008 at 8:00 am
Hey….Is this not copying? Won’t google ban the site for this? I am a little confused.
Jennifer // Feb 15, 2008 at 8:23 pm
A lot of people argue that RSS feeds are for publishing - it’s publishing a small blurb and linking back, so I don’t really see a big problem with that.
I did remove mine, however, because I just didn’t think those sites were really useful to readers in the end.
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