As I set out to ‘generate’ content in the stealing sense of the word, I started working with tools that are available. These tools work with RSS feeds from the web to form web content. Unfortunately I found out that these tools mostly suck.

For my purpose I used Wordpress and some of it’s plug-ins, like WP-O-Matic to consume RSS feeds and show them on the WP page. This turned out not to be so straightforward.

Update (16 october): the automated test blog traffic is growing very fast: 2000 spider visits/250 uniques/1300 pageviews yesterday. Seems the experiment is working.

To make WP function well, a lot of configuration was needed. In itself this is not a problem, but a lot of this configuration was related to the content and the domain the WP install was on. That kind of configuration can be automated, but it is very difficult to do that fully (in the coming weeks we’ll see that the results of fully automated versions are much much worse than the ones that got a little love).

But the worst turn off was WP-O-Matic; it worked like crap on almost all feeds I tried. For the purpose of presenting a nice and interesting blog for human readers to use, this thing is really not usable. A lot of streams come out like total garbage, it doesn’t support a lot of the different formats the feeds can have and so on. This mostly is because the parser that is used to consume the RSS content, called SimplePie, is quite worthless. At least for practical cases. Better not waste any time on it.

The other, quite functional readers I found where Javascript RSS readers. These are worthless as Google cannot even read their contents. Meaning it won’t do much good at all to use these on your ‘content generated’ pages.

To remedy this problem I decided to throw some code together to make a SimplePie drop-in system that does work with WP-O-Matic and does work correctly on the streams I am using. And I needed to have those streams to make the content look very real.

The blogs that I am ‘generating’ look really great and can really be read by others; if people are not sharp they really won’t know the content came from an RSS; it looks almost perfect. It also uses some special tricks to do all the SEO correctly. In the end I removed and rewrote then entire core of WP-O-Matic to handle all complexity of making a serious blog out of feeds and searches.

In the coming weeks we’ll follow how successful the blogs that were created are; if they get any visitors, if they make any money etc. When it is proven that this system works well, I’ll open an installation and tweaking service for the public to set up these blogs, feeds, searches, SEO and so forth.

Keep watching!