Facibus On Blogging

I came across an autoblog called WiiReign. I found it strangely unsettling that there was a blog out there that was populated almost entirely (5345 out of 5348) populated by RSS news items. I wondered why they bothered - they must not get a lot of repeat readers. I’ve heard about such things, but never come across one before.

I thought about what the “good” uses of autopopulated content might be. I have some autopopulated content over at MonsterWatch - Australian ABC and Google News forms part of the front page. The rest of it is all decently human-crafted

So I thought about how I might add a “Latest news about…” page to a WordPress blog. After a little fooling around I produced Wii in the News - it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a bunch of content supplied by Google News. News summary items are certainly not presented as blog posts.

This is how I did it.

1. I got the FeedList plugin. FeedList presents a simple way to show the results of an RSS feed on a WordPress page.
2. To execute the PHP in FeedList, I looked around for a better way than ExecPHP (this caused me some grief in the past by getting in the way of the smart editor). I came across a posting in the WordPress Support Forums that suggested the True and Proper way - create a template that includes the PHP code.
3. I created the following template:

<?php
/*
Template Name: OnWii Google News
*/
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div class=”content”>

<div id=”primary”>
<div id=”current-content”>
<div id=”primarycontent” class=”hfeed”>

<?php

feedList(”http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=nintendo+wii&ie=UTF-8&output=rss”)

?>

</div> <!– #primarycontent .hfeed –>
</div> <!– #current-content –>

<div id=”dynamic-content”></div>
</div> <!– #primary –>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

</div> <!– .content –>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

…and uploaded it to the K2 theme directory. I then created a page (Wii in the News) that used my new template. No sweat

Would I ever create a whole blog out of other people’s content? I am not sure that I would. But it was fun to add a “Latest Google News” equivalent page to a blog. You might have a specialised topic area that would profit from such a page - if so, why not give it a shot?

Note: an unscrupulous operator might use this same method to create a blogfarm to boost their technorati authority rating by subscribing to RSS feeds from their own circle of blogs, such that one post was replicated several times to mirror-blogs. I’m not sure that this would be of any longterm use to them, as their googlerank would suffer as a result of the duplicated content. Interesting concept though

UPDATE: I thought about it for about 10 seconds and decided to extend the concept to Blogging in the News. Tell me what you think - is it wrong? Is it useful?

UPDATE 2: I’ve made the code for the template above available as a text file to stop it getting mangled - download it and change the name to onblogging_google_news.php - sorry about that