Blog Solution - personal experiences

I've installed Blog Solution, and all in all I'm pretty happy with it. Here are my impressions so far:

Unlike most software in the get-rich-quick genre, Blog Solution actually delivers. Of course, they use the same daft sales pitches you've seen everywhere else ("OMG - I earned $40.000 in my first week", "All my sites have PR6 - I'm in shock", "The Future of Software", etc) but the software is solid built, fairly easy to use and comes with an active forum and video tutorials.

Omar, one of the authors of Blog Solution, has compiled a blueprint which contains a lot of useful hints on how to use the Blog Solution software to avoid penalties of various kinds. The blueprint has a down-to-earth, honest, biased (of course) and affiliate-link-free way of guiding you through the art of setting up splogs.

Blog Solution is a bit picky when it comes to your server's configuration. You need to install the scripts on your server. You need at least one domain and a hosting account that support:

• Linux (no support for Windows boxes)
  
• PHP
• MySQL
• Zend Optimizer

Be sure that you are able to configure cron jobs without any hassle on your server! I used my Dreamhost server for this purpose, and I was able to configure and install everything, including the cron job, in one go.

BlogSolution makes simple web sites that doesn't look too good. You can use customised templates, so I guess your autogenerated blogs can look pretty well, it just depends on how much design work you put into it.

The content is pretty simple and pretty poor. Well, this depends of course on the RSS feed(s) you are using, but if you use all the default settings, you end up with a pretty crappy looking blog.

When you install BlogSolution, you have to install it on a brand new domain. I created blog.norgesinfo.com (this is regarded as a new domain. www.norgesinfo.com/blog isn't). Then you install the files (one minute binary upload), enter your keywords, generate your blogs (18 keywords generate 18 blogs -- one blog for each keyword), set up your three cron jobs (one for blog creation (in case you will roll out one and one blog at a time instead of hundreds of blogs at the same time), one for post creation and one for pinging) and finally forget all about the blog.

My main site www.norgesinfo.com is about traveling, so I decided to give my blog the same theme. I entered the following keywords:

• experience norway
• travel norway
  
• lofoten islands
• paddling canada
• kayak mexico
• kayak canada
• kayak geirangerfjord
• paddling helgelands coast
• paddling
• group adventures
• coast of helgeland
• lofoten
• geiranger fjord
• activities geirangerfjord
• activities lofoten
• activities norway
• experience geirangerfjord
• experience lofoten

You can see the result here: blog.norgesinfo.com.

Cons: Crappy layout (can be improved by better design), limited amount of text in each post (due to the RSS feeds. Can this be improved? I think a product called RSS Magician can help me here), poor quality of the various posts (is there a way to quality control these posts before they are posted? I think ContentSolution can help me rewrite articles manually.).

Pros: Very randomized postings, very randomized link building, very flexible mixing of the various RSS feed sources, extremely easy to set up, fun(!!!!), fantastic tutorial videos, nice software.

All in all: I can recommend this product, and I'm looking forward to playing a lot more with it in the time to come!