Auto-blogging - care of wordpress

How to get other people to write your post pages - without server strain.

After being shut out of my hosting for a domain (because cheap hosting is cheap hosting) when my WordPress installation twice bogged their server, I've become more careful.

The idea hit me (and their are several good plugins for this) is to use this blog as an aggregator, so that it goes:

1. RSS feed is collected,
2. Is brought to blog
3. converted to posts
4. new RSS feed created

And then I thought - no, that would make this server have to work, with cron jobs and whatnot - the database work on top of that might be too much and I'd be off my new server (same cheap webhost) for good.

But, as the mind churns, I then thought that I could get Google to do my work for me. Google Alerts sends you email and WordPress allows you to post by email (as does Blogger), so:

1. Google Alert scours and finds data from various posts.
2. Sends email to blog
3. Blog converts these to posts.
4. New RSS feed created from the aggregate.

Of course this needs testing.

But think of the applications. Create a free blogger host and then have Google Alerts populate it with posts. You can then collect these posts' RSS feed and funnel this to Friendfeed or Google Reader as an aggregator, by type, author, subject - whatever you feel you need to organize the data.

Needs a test. But should be doable.

Sub text of this is that for a regular blog, you will build up posts and so content. If these then post directly to categories and not your front page, and if you also have Google sitemaps installed, it becomes an auto-content generator. Probably won't ever rank high on SEO, but on the other hand, it might at least send your links some link love.

Best reason is to have computers do your aggregating and digesting for you. Especially if you can get free blog platforms to do this. Have to try this out with some older blogs... nice way to revive them.