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Automated Blogging: A Review of RSS to Blog Software
A month or two ago I decided to be some blog posting software
called RSS to Blog. The software promised to automate some of
the more mundane tasks of blogging. Having implemented the
software and read extensively about it, I would now like to
offer my two cents worth on RSS to Blog.
First of all, the program does do what it says it will in terms
of automating the blogging process. You can paste in scores of
articles in advance, and RSS to Blog will faithfully post them
to your blog. This can be done in random intervals, and is done
with the help of cron jobs, which are a way of running automatic
scripts on a web server. RSS to Blog can also post RSS feeds
from other sites into your blog, and rotate things randomly.
The idea of automated blog posting is particularly nice for a
blogger who is going on vacation, or has trouble maintaining the
daily discipline of blogging. However, there is also a
significant amount of abuse associated with this type of
software.
Most notably, people are publishing spammy blogs, otherwise
known as splogs. Some people are publishing as many as 250 blogs
each, all spewing forth spammy content laced with Google Adsense
ads. One I read about online claimed to be making $200k per
year, a claim that I tend to believe.
The problem is, these cron jobs suck up a lot of server
resources. It doesn't hurt a server if somebody has a cron job
automating their blog posts 2-4 times per day. But these people
who have 100, 200 or 250 blogs, and who are posting and pinging
at a high rate of speed, can take down a server all by
themselves. Then when a bunch of people running the same script
at the same time all congregate on the same server, this really
wreaks havoc. So much so, that some web hosts have kicked RSS to
Blog software users from their hosting service.
This is a shame, because when used properly, RSS to Blog really
can be a helpful productivity tool. Personally, I like to write
in spurts. I would rather write 2-10 pages of content, divide it
into original posts, and set them up to run over time, than be
driven by a need to blog 2-4 times per day, day in and day out.
This doesn't lessen the quality of my posts, it only makes life
easier for a busy person.
This is in contrast to people who are picking certain keywords,
generating thousands of pages, and pinging the daylights out of
the blogosphere. I don't hate such people, and if they can earn
$200k per year cranking out spam, more power to them. But truth
be told, I think the search engines and users are getting
smarter and smarter about weeding out spam and splogs.
One spammy splogger noted online that he couldn't care less how
rotten his pages were, in fact his goal was to make people who
landed on his pages want to barf so badly that they would click
on a Google ad just to get off his lousy page. With all due
respect, this doesn't seem like a very profitable business model
for Google or its advertisers.
The sploggers also say that they have to keep building,
building, building more and more splogs--because once the search
engines find out what they are, their traffic tapers off and
drops. This is in contrast to a truly helpful blog with great
content, whose value and traffic should continue to spiral
upward.
In their defense, I don't think the developers of RSS to Blog
intended for their software to be used in this manner. As a
matter of fact, I heard rumblings about limits to be built into
newer, more powerful versions. That sounds like a good idea to
me. It's always nice to land on a page with truly meaningful and
helpful content.
Since I didn't want any surprises, and have a good relationship
with my web host, I phoned him and told him about the software I
was using. He agreed with me that RSS to Blog could be a
powerful productivity tool, and that if used rightly (e.g. a
reasonable number of random posts) should not diminish his
server resources in the least little way. This made me pretty
happy, since I plan to use RSS to Blog to help promote my log
furniture store.
About the author:
Cari Haus, CPA and entrepreneur, has been a webmaster and online
retailer for more than five years. She sells log furniture
through her website, http://www.logcabinrustics.com/