I’ve previously discussed my experiences and experiments with autoblogging (autopopulation of blogs via an RSS feed). While I am not convinced that any blog so produced will be of any use, the concept of “content for nothing” fascinates me so I play with it every now and then.
Today I am playing with the WP-o-Matic plugin for WordPress. Out of the box, it is a bit broken, but Eli Sand’s suggested fixes helped me to get it working. Here is what he suggested:
My first effort at a semi-successful WP-o-Matic autoblog was Mobile Computing. I originally set it up to take a feed from ezinearticles.com’s RSS feed directory - and the reason I call it semi-successful was that Mobile Computing only autopopulated with article summaries rather than full feed from ezinearticles.
So I experimented - next stop was a known full feed - my own blogs. What I did was add the feed from this blog (Facibus Reviews) to Mobile Computing. Sure enough, the full feed (rather than just a summary) came through. This leads me to think that ezinearticles.com’s feed is summary-only by default - this makes sense, I suppose that they don’t wat to be the one-stop source for autoblogs.
There are authors who publish full RSS feeds - most of them, really - but this raises the issue: where do I get a full feed for an autoblog with author permission? If I was an idiot, or prepared to fully embrace the Dark Side, I would just autoblog my favourite feeds - but I can’t see the point (or the profit) in this. So I looked at alternatives to ezinearticles.com:
- IdeaMarketers selected themselves out of this trial because they want $9.95 a month for total access to their article library.
- ArticleFever only provides a full feed to all of their articles (not individual topic categories suitable for a niche blog) and only summaries at that - not suitable for autoblog fodder (and that is probably the way they like it)
- Gekoe has no discernable RSS feed.
So what would I do if I wanted to take this concept further? If I had no qualms about content thievery I’d point WP-o-Matic at a few of the top 100 blogs in the desired niche (whatever that niche is) or at a technorati query feed.
But at this stage, I am left to ask this question: are there any full-feed article repositories out there?
Do you know how to set up your blog for RSS feeds and autoblogging? Check with your ASP hosting provider if you’re not sure. They may be able to give you tips, whether you use a Windows hosting company or more advanced Unix hosting services.
) from my Nokia e61 phone, so it is a nuisance to have to go to a site that may not be optimised for mobile browsing to read the rest of an article - I prefer full feeds. 
Eli Sand, on March 18th, 2007 at 5:45 pm Said:
I am just trying this plugin out and you have a few issues.
On line 334 of wpomatic.php, you have hardcoded “wp_rssfeeds” as the table name - it should be replaced with {$this->dbfeeds} instead (I do not use wp_ as my table prefix).
Also, your tables that you create should be these (rather than what you have used:
CREATE TABLE `{$this->dbfeeds}` (
`id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`feedurl` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`lasthash` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`active` tinyint(1) default ‘1′,
`frequency` int(5) default ‘1′,
`sourceattribution` tinyint(1) default ‘1′,
`lastparsed` timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
);
CREATE TABLE `{$this->dbcategories}` (
`id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`catid` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
`feedid` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
);
The difference being that I have switched them to use BIGINT’s for the id’s (more info can be stored), and your VARCHAR’s can support up to 255 characters, so no point in limiting to just 250.