Behind The Blog

Anyone out there have a great way to mirror an existing blog into a WordPress MU site?

Here’s the deal… with our recent acquisition of VoiceObjects, we now have a developer blog hosted on the VoiceObjects site and for a variety of reasons we’d like to continue to have it hosted there on the VO site. It’s well-integrated with the rest of the site… the authors are all set up to publish to it… etc, etc. I don’t want to move it to our WPMU site here. Maybe someday that will make sense… but not right now.

What I would like to do now, though, is to mirror the content over into this blog site. Essentially create another blog here and just have posts from there appear here. This helps promote VoiceObjects activities within the larger realm of Voxeo activities, plus the VO posts then also go out through our Twitter and FriendFeed streams.

In looking around the web, I have seen a lot of WordPress plugins that will let you import a blog if you are migrating an existing blog over into WordPress or WordPress MU… but so far the only one that seems to let me mirror a site is the SmartRSS plugin. Another one, FeedList, looks close, but without actually installing it I can’t tell if this will mirror content into a main blog area – or if it is more designed for sidebar widgets. This WordPress forum post shows that others are looking for similar solutions.

Any suggestions? Can any of you recommend a plugin to mirror one blog in a WordPress / WordPress MU site?

Thanks in advance. Any advice would be greatly appreciated – and I’ll definitely update this blog as I come up with a solution.

UPDATE – Shortly after I posted this, Olle Johansson suggested I check out WP-o-Matic which does indeed look like it will do the trick! (Thanks, Olle!)

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If you have been following any of our Voxeo blogs for a while, you may or may not have noticed that blog posts are starting to incorporate a footer that looks like this:

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My rationale for doing this is quite simple. It’s a fact of life that if you offer a RSS feed for your blog site, your content is going to get “scraped” and show up on other websites by spammers who are purely looking to use your text to get some search engine attention so that they can theoretically get people to click on the ads that they surround your content with.

It’s annoying. Especially when you’ve written some really good content and you want the people coming to your site versus the spammer’s site.

However, after eight years of blogging I’ve learned that there is only so much you can do. Every now and then if there is someone re-using our content in a particular egregious fashion, I’ll try to contact them. But 99% of the time they either don’t easily have contact info or make it difficult to find. (Then there was the time I called up on the phone someone scraping one of my external blogs. She was rather puzzled as to how I got her number, but it was simply in the DNS records for the domain she was using. Needless to say, she agreed to stop scraping my content.) Chasing down content scrapers and asking them to stop takes up time and energy that could, quite frankly, be better spent generating new blog entries and other projects. At some point you have to ask if it’s worth the hassle.

Instead of fighting, I’m trying to use it more as an opportunity for publicity. I’ve found that most of the content scrapers, and so far all the ones I’ve found scraping Voxeo content, are just taking our RSS items verbatim and running them on their sites. Now this isn’t always the case. I’ve found some very bizarre mashups of my content with other content on some spam sites. But for the most part it seems to be true.

So if they are going to take all the content “as is”, I want to make sure that they get some subscription links in there so that perhaps people finding the content on the spammer’s sites will find up coming back to our own site.

Right now I’m adding the footers manually, but at some point I may get around to incorporating them directly into the WordPress template we use to create all of our posts.

We’ll see. It’s all part of this grand experiment known as social media…

What do you do to combat content scrapers? Or do you just not care and consider it added publicity?

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