Discussion on how to auto-post "news" on your blog and the greatest obstacle to this arrangement.

This is a fairly easy job. But, the most concerning or “painful” part of the arrangement is that you need to keep a watch on the “post”. And, as soon as it arrives as a post, you have to modify certain sections of the same or else your blog visitors might delete this arrangement unknowingly.

So, how do you configure your blog to have auto-posts like the one below?

First, you need to create an alert via Google. Go to Google Alerts and create an alert.

For example, if you want to auto-post consolidated news which contains the following keywords-

“Gorkhas” OR “Gorkhaland” OR “Sikkim” OR “Darjeeling”

then in the “Search Term” field enter the terms(without quotes), select type as “News”, frequency as “Daily” and in the “Deliver to” field, enter your e-mail address.

Now, go to your e-mail account which will receive the alert and create a filter to forward mails with the subject line

“Google Alert: Gorkhas or Gorkhaland or Sikkim or Darjeeling”

to your blog. Of course, you need to configure your blog settings as below:-

As you can see from the above screenshot, enter the e-mail address from where you want to forward the e-mails in the “BlogSend Address” field and enter your blog’s e-mail posting address. I have selected “sachintewari.chhetri[at]blogger.com”

Set option to “Publish mails immediately”.

Now, as soon as the alert comes in to your inbox, it gets forwarded to the “Email posting address” and the post is up on your blog. Note that you need to enter the forwarding e-mail account as your “BlogSend Address”.

The potential flaw in this arrangement, it’s death knell. Is it deliberate?

The most potential drawback of the arrangement is that “Google Alerts” comes into your inbox with the following options at the end:-

If this e-mail gets forwarded as a post to your blog, it gets posted as it is. So now, if someone happens to click “Remove”, then sadly, you get unsubscribed from the alert. On a closer look at the “Remove” hyperlink, I observed that some session information is passed which auto-authenticates any user clicking on the “Remove” link as below:-

http://www.google.com/alerts/remove?s=EAAAAKT_8V2vWmzHNs-220sYNuo&hl=en&gl=us

Now, this spoils the party, doesn’t it?

I am not too sure if “Google” has done this to avoid users from spamming the internet with auto-posts. But, I definitely got a clear message from my blog subscribers or my blog visitors, they DON’T like being spammed with consolidated news!

Apologies fellas!!