Zennoposter

Over the last two weeks I've been playing about with Zennoposter. I thought that I'd record my experience here. Some good some bad.

First of I had problems. Lots of problems. I have two machines that I use for work. A desktop machine and a laptop.

Surprisingly after a week of hard work I couldn't get Zennoposter to work. It just wouldn't. The guys there logged in remotely and they couldn't get it to work either. If I hadn't had a laptop on which to work everything would have stopped there.

However I do have a laptop and I have managed after some fidling to get it to work.

So I've now spent two weeks getting it working.
The first week I spent trying to do everything in Zennoposter.

I have a complex strategy. I want to post articles to web 2.0, blog, wiki and other sites. No problem with that but I also want randomness. So if a site has had the article posted before it shouldn't be posted again, the articles itself shouldn't be posted across all the sites too many times, links should only be shown sometimes, the variable need to be variable on a per site and a per article basis and so on. Lots of criteria to keep it clean and useful for backlinking.

Just to be clear here I also want each of the mini sites to be useful. That is I want them to read well and be entertaining to the visitor. That way I reckon I'm doing a good service promoting the field that I'm working in and hopefully getting benefit from backlinks and hence Google ranking.

However trying to do this kind of strategy on Zennoposter is difficult. After a week I gave up. I had a ton of boxes all interlinked all working with lists and tables and ... Whilst it worked it wasn't maintainable.

Maintenance will I'm sure be a big thing. I need to be able to adjust the strategy and keep it working with lots of different sites. So frankly if I need some huge cumbersome network of boxes then it ain't going to work.

Fortunately you can use code to control things. Which is what I ended up doing. I threw away a weeks work (about 50 hours) and started again. I wrote all the logic in php using a mysql database. It took about a day.

I then interfaced it to zennoposter and hey presto I could get the info I wanted.

It's probably worth pointing out that at the moment Zennoposter 4 doesn't have a code interface system like Zennoposter 3 - they've not built it yet and there is no forecast release date. However if you're an okay programmer this isn't too much of an issue.

So then I still needed Zennoposter to do the web interface and put in the values etc. This took a good while - perhaps 3 days for the first site.
To date I've only added one 2.0 site cause they take a while to get working well but I'll let you know when I've done more.

On a really positive note I have to say that sitting watching my software automatically posting to a web 2.0 site gives me great hope. It posts in a way that nuke and amd etc can't. Just simply because it's bespoke. I control everything. Whilst it takes more time the quality of the output is much much higher and so I think that the ultimate result will be backlinks that are far more valuable.

Anyway enough for now. I'll let you know how my journey goes on. And in case you're depating, UBOT, Zennoposter, Nuke, AMD etc My vote goes to Zennoposter with the caveat that you do need to be able to program to get a good result. It'll do okay with out the coding but fantastic with it.