Oh no! I’m now a splogger! Please don’t hate me. I’m not stealing your content. I’m just “syndicating it”. Nice word isn’t it - syndicate. Anyway I am not going into the debate of content syndication and outright content stealing. I’m just going to go ahead and document what I did to create my first splog with WordPress :)

Requirement:

WordPress latest version (2.5 just came out today)

Steps

  1. Download and install Smart RSS.
  2. Do the normal uploads and there will be 2 new files in the plugin folder
  3. Activate SmartRSS plugin
  4. Move and/or rename the wp_smartrss.php script which will activate the ’scraping’ action
  5. Go to Google News and find some news with juicy keywords
  6. Set up a cron job to call the wp_smartrss.php script (I set mine to update midnight everyday)
  7. Add adsense (As a shortcut, I used DoshDosh Prosense theme, just spend 2-3 minutes to find and replace publisher ID in the template)
  8. Generate traffic
  9. Earn money

image There are other programs such as RSStoBlog that will charge you an arm and a leg (USD 247 to be exact) but I feel Smart RSS is a good free alternative. Some sites regard RSStoBlog as an essential tool to RSS content syndication or Autoblogging (auto pilot blogging - make money in your sleep).

Of course RSStoBlog boasts a ton of features but  if you are a programmer, you can easily hack the Smart RSS codes to add features you want.

 

Ok. On the serious side, I frown at people stealing my content and making money from it. But with RSS the way it is, the most you can do is not to post full content RSS feeds like what 5xmom did once. Don’t et me wrong,ok ?

I hate content scrapers and splogs.

As an experiment, I actually did follow the steps outlined above and came out with a working splogs blog aggregator.

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Malaysia Chess Websites and Blogs - collection of contents pulled from 10 different local chess blogs and websites. Of course this is with the permission of the owners. If they don’t like it, their RSS content will be removed immediately.

Anyway, the Malaysian chess community is not so much into money making and blog monetization, so they is not much fuss here.

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To spice things up a bit, I also added WP-Postrating plugin to spice things up so that the local chess community can vote an article up or down.

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The highest rated article appears at the sidebar above the fold. I think it’s a nice community tool that will encourage the local chess bloggers to blog more and write interesting content. That’s my main aim for the website anyway.

All the above took me less than an hour to set up. It’s really that easy!

Wanna create a splogg now ?  :)

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