Automating a Wordpress Magazine with RSS or Email

I’ve been toying with the idea of automating an online magazine with a wordpress engine for several weeks, but I haven’t yet found a fully functional value-added solution. I believe it’s fully possible, though. Here’s what I’ve gathered so far:

1. Use Google Alerts to create several RSS feeds around the keywords you want the subject of your the online magazine to be about. For instance, if one were developing an online magazine based on Environmentalism, the Google Alerts would be for keywords like “Green Economy” or “Solar Power”.
2. Tie these Google Alerts RSS feeds together using Yahoo Pipes. You can emit just one RSS feed with this method. This step is also important because it is here where you’ll be able to truncate the content of the RSS feed – which will help avoid duplicate content issues with Search Engines.
   
3. Publish Remotely to a Wordpress blog (or via email, if it’s necessary to convert RSS to email — which might be the case if CSS is an issue).
4. Customization of the display of the content is controlled with CSS. The tuncated content pulled from this system should not be duplicated from the source of the content though. I imagine a script could be written to swap words for their synonyms or reverse the grammar of every third sentance — something to substantially modify the original content.

At this point, I’m unsure how to exactly pull this off while adding analytical value to the content. I imagine that I could pass the RSS feed through a service like Google Reader and only post those items I choose to Share with Note, or perhaps use xFruits to send the feed to an email address where analysis could be added to the top of the content. Using the email method would further allow submission of the post via email… Hmm… Sounds like the answer… but the downside is that these analysis-added methods (especially the via email method) require that human input – which is a little antithetical to the automated goal…

I’ve been testing methods of autmating a blog on arturges.us now for a while. None of those methods have really satisfied my aspirations for an effective system yet, though. I originally based the automation strategies of Art Urges on the Blogger engine, but will be trading in its engine soon to test my automation strategies on Wordpress. Although both systems enable posting from email, I think Wordpress is just a better long-term CMS solution.

If you have any ideas on how to really grind on automated posting, leave a comment – I’d love to figure something out collaboratively!