A month or two ago I decided to be some blog posting software called RSS to Blog. The software promised to automate some of the more mundane tasks of blogging. Having implemented the software and read extensively about it, I would now like to offer my two cents worth on RSS to Blog.

First of all, the program does do what it says it will in terms of automating the blogging process. You can paste in scores of articles in advance, and RSS to Blog will faithfully post them to your blog. This can be done in random intervals, and is done with the help of cron jobs, which are a way of running automatic scripts on a web server. RSS to Blog can also post RSS feeds from other sites into your blog, and rotate things randomly.

The idea of automated blog posting is particularly nice for a blogger who is going on vacation, or has trouble maintaining the daily discipline of blogging. However, there is also a significant amount of abuse associated with this type of software.

Most notably, people are publishing spammy blogs, otherwise known as splogs. Some people are publishing as many as 250 blogs each, all spewing forth spammy content laced with Google Adsense ads. One I read about online claimed to be making $200k per year, a claim that I tend to believe.

The problem is, these cron jobs suck up a lot of server resources. It doesn