What Would You Expect To Pay?

[Useless]

Anyone who has ever worked with me knows that I'm really bad establishing prices, but let me walk you (or anyone who is considering do this for you) through this.

The installation of a WordPress blog is a 5 minute task, and that's if you are smoking and/or sipping coffee while doing it. Unhindered, you could probably knock it down to 3 or 4 minutes. The actual uploading of the files to the server requires the majority of those minutes - that's how simple a WordPress installation is. You login to your control panel. Create a database. Edit your database connection info on the wp-config file. Then upload. Go to the install page and follow the 3 seconds of instructions. Done.

It's the customizing that slows you down. You have to configure the permalinks, kill comments, and install the plugins. (Once who ever does this has done 2 or 3 of them, this whole process will go quite quickly as well.) Modifying each of the templates visually is going to take the most time, especially if you are using different themes and renaming any graphics with keywords/phrases.

Obviously, automatic updates will require an aggregation plugin that utilizes WP's fake cron job or an actual cron job handled through your control panel.

Lastly, you add the sponsor feeds. A cautionary note: many sponsor feeds have been tossed together so quickly [so the sponsor can yell 'we have feeds!'] that many links within the posts quite obviously don't carry the affiliate code. Nice. The state of blog RSS feeds in this industry is horrific. The quality control simply isn't there. I gave up on using sponsor feeds a while back, but Walrus and a couple of others may know of some quality feeds that are more than lists of galleries.

Keep in mind, updating feeds everyday, especially on 50 separate blogs, will bog your server down.

[walrus]

Depending on the amount of customization to be done on the template, it takes me between 4-6 hours to get a WP blog up and running with feeds. Now I'm not terribly organized so someone who was could probably cut that down by an hour or so.

I use blog organizer but not for this type of project. Probably the biggest reason is that I like to customize the WP-Autoblog plugin a little bit but also there are plugins that I'm convinced help me that just aren't available with a program like blog organizer.

[Linkster]

Thanks for the replies - UW - Ive got to ask - how much bogging down really occurs updating feeds - seems it would be less than updating and rotating thumbs on a tgp maybe? Id be real interested in what kind of server loads we would be talking about?

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Linkster

Thanks for the replies - UW - Ive got to ask - how much bogging down really occurs updating feeds

I use FeedWordPress on a couple of sites for feed syndication and it - the script - moves very slowly. How much of that is due to server performance - I really don't know. When I see a script crawling like that, I assume it's impacting the server itself, but I may be very wrong. A lot is going on though, while a blog is being updated. The syndication script is polling the various feeds' servers for updates, adding new posts to the blog's datatbase, and WP is pinging an array of other sites to tell them that your blog has just updated. I may be very wrong about a server impact since it could be the communication between your server and all those other servers which causes the delay. Honestly, this is the first time I have ever given the entire process this much thought. Any other time I just sit here thinking, "fuck, this is slow".

FeedWordPress would require a cronjob in order to perform the updates automatically. There is another syndication plugin called WP-Autoblog that uses WP's fake cron (I think) and will auto update on it's own. I didn't have any luck with that one, but that's probably because I didn't apply the correct settings to it. I think that's the one Walrus uses quite successfully though.

[walrus]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

FeedWordPress would require a cronjob in order to perform the updates automatically. There is another syndication plugin called WP-Autoblog that uses WP's fake cron (I think) and will auto update on it's own. I didn't have any luck with that one, but that's probably because I didn't apply the correct settings to it. I think that's the one Walrus uses quite successfully though.

Originally I used FeedWordPress but was having a problem with it duplicating posts from some of the sponsor feeds I was using. Couldn't figure out what was causing it since the same sponsor feeds were working on other blogs. I haven't had that problem with WP-Autoblog.

But thats neither here nor there since you eluded to using a different program for actually aggregating your feeds into blogs.