In this article we will discuss the secret of automatic content generation and for those using the Wordpress platform how your choice of blogging platform may limit your future developments.

As your endeavours in web/blog site developments progress, you will inevitably ask how do I do this in Wordpress and you will soon come to the realisation that you need to look else where.  Let me start by explaining my own experiences in this area, and the reasons why I’ve started looking for an alternative.

Wordpress

As a beginning Content Management System (CMS) platform, nothing can match Wordpress in it’s ease of use and straight out of the box functionality that it gives you.  As you can see, the web site you have accessed where I am blogging about all my technical forays into getting things to work for myself is an example of this elegant and very useable platform.

For those new to Wordpress, I can’t do better than quoting what they say on their website:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

New to blogging? Learn more about WordPress, then follow the three easy steps below to start blogging in minutes. Or, for the ultimate in ease of use, get a free blog on WordPress.com.

Yes, it is the ideal platform to start blogging and publishing in an external hosting solution, without getting into the guts of programming.  It does what is says on the tin.  It has all the ingredients you need to start you off and create great blogging sites.  Go to http://wordpress.org/ click on extend and then themes, you will be amazed at all the fantastic themes out there for this platform, and I’m sure you’ll recognise lots of them from sites you’ve visited.  In a previous article, I covered how to start blogging with blogger.com, and Wordpress also has this functionality.  You can create your own blog on Wordpress and share it with the world, and it’s all free too, just like blogger.com.  The beauty of doing it in Wordpress is the integration with all their themes, although I have n’t tried this myself yet.

No, what I did was, get myself a Domain Name from 123-Reg, get some space on a web-server from Webhostinguk, and build it all myself, bottom up as they say.  Well, I tried all the options that my hosting company provided through some scripting software called Fantastico, but I found that their versions of Wordpress were out of date.  So in the end I went over to Wordpress.org and just downloaded and installed the latest release myself and got it going.  I spent quite a bit of time looking for a good theme, and I wanted a magazine style theme as this is the craze at the moment and allows you to put nice front page content which teases readers into your various articles with a good splattering of images.  The theme I settled on was the Arthemia theme by Michael Jubel.  That’s it really, it took a bit of tweaking to get the theme working but once that was done, the site just needed to be maintained and kept up to date.  I will cover the steps in more detail in some other articles, but for now lets look at reasons for changing.

The Secret of Automatic Content Generation

From my recent posts on making money and the hype versus the reality, you will have gathered the importance of content.  Your ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) will be determined by your content.  Google and other search engine’s use complex algorithms to determine whether the content on your site is ORIGINAL and also whether there is enough of it to warrant your site as an authority on a particular subject.  This is called relevance.  How relevant is your content to the searches a user is performing.  Now, search engines crawl the internet to update their databases on this new content, and the emphasis is on new, not duplicates because the algorithms already know the sites that are authorities on various subjects and if you’re not careful they can easily stop crawling your site if all it contains is duplicate content.

Truth is, unless you have an army of writers at your disposal, it’s hard to keep generating new content.  The trick is to look at how we can generate this without effort from ourselves, because once you have posted your article, it sits there as a flat page, no new content is being added to it and the search engine’s don’t keep tabs on it if it’s not changing.  This is where getting readers to make comments on your articles comes in, because what is happening is that your readers are adding new content to your web-site or blog, on that already indexed page which makes it more interesting to search engines.  Basically, your content is growing through your readers contributions, and this really is the way some of the big sites such as Pro-Blogger stay at the top, they have an active readership.

That will work on a standard blog, you can get your readership up through newsreaders and email subscriptions to your articles and comments, but really it’s the people’s comments you want, and the more they add the better.  Now, this is where the next trick comes in.  If you can create a COMMUNITY of people interested in what you’re doing or talking about, and more importantly adding content to your site, then your content generation process becomes automatic.  Other people do the work for you.  Your web-site grows in relevance because people are discussing subjects, creating new topics and basically doing your work for you.  That’s the beauty of Forums and getting people to register with your website so they log-in before they can add comments and get involved in discussions.

There you have it, we need to move into the space of SOCIAL COMMUNITIES, groups of people who help and support each other and add content to our site, how do we do this with Wordpress.  This is the limitation, I am talking about.  It does a good job of blogging, but when we want to go beyond that and extend what we’re doing, we’re stuck.

Conclusions

I have enjoyed using Wordpress as a blogging platform, it was the ideal stepping stone for me to start my journey back into web programming and creating websites that are up to date and can join the blogosphere as worthy contenders, as good as the best that’s out there.  But it’s not enough, I guess in my journey my own expectations have grown beyond what I started with.  It’s a platform I’ll continue to use, as it has an ease of use, which is unmatched in my opinion.

For where we want to go next, the pretender to the throne is Drupal 6.x, which offers so much flexibility and versatility that it is mind boggling!!!  In my next article, I’ll cover the pain I’m going through with this new platform.   Yes, nothing comes easy, but then, you only get the view of the vistas, once you have climbed the mountain!!!

Daniel Hunt

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