I have been testing Blog Solution 2 for over 3 months (since June 2006). I did not want to rush a review without testing it myself. This explains the huge delay between the Blog Solution 1 review and this review.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to reproduce the results of my previous Blog Solution 1 installation. Version 2 was supposed to be better than version 1 but I never got it to work as well as the old version.
I gave this auto blogging script a good run of over 3 months and I was very disappointed to find that my 6 most recent Blog Solution blogs (version 2.5.4) that were installed last month did not have any posts in them. I used the same settings as the previous 4 Blog Solution blogs (version 2.0.7) I installed some time in May but they don’t work. I had a lot of problems installing, configuring, and running Blog Solution 2 and I don’t feel like it is worth all the effort. I left my old Blog Solution blogs at the old version 2.0.7 because I would have to re-install the whole damn thing by erasing the database, uploading the new files, adding all the links, and blogs all over again. For some strange reason, I could not simply upload the latest files to update my Blog Solution installation but I had totally install a new copy.
The documentation provided does help in the installation part fairly well but it comes short in the configuration part. There a lot of new Blog Solution jargons you need to learn. I messed up my VPS web host because I had too many “pending posts” in my Blog Solution installations and that was caused by a “wrong” setting in the RSS feed options. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to add “too many” RSS feeds to my blogs and check on certain options to limit the number of “pending posts”. The author told me “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”. I had to ask the author what those posting/RSS options mean in plain English and what I need to check and uncheck to make sure I don’t get too many “pending posts” that would crash my VPS web host. There are no clear dos and don’ts when using Blog Solution therefore you will need to discover what you should and should not do with some trial and error on your own.
Blog Solution uses CRON jobs to automate the blog generation and posting process. You will need to plan these CRON jobs properly or you might crash your web host. You should take a look at the support forums to see how other people plan their CRON jobs and model after them. I have found that if you set the CRON jobs to run every X hours is a surefire way to crash your web host if you have more than 1 installation of Blog Solution. I planned my CRON jobs to run at a fixed time during the day for each installation to prevent more than 1 installation of Blog Solution to run at the same time.
I am willing to deal with the steep learning curve of using Blog Solution but the one thing that ticks me off the most is the link import tool. To mass post links to your Blog Solution blogs, you can only post approximately 3000 links at a time. This is not a Blog Solution limitation but a limitation with our browsers. I suggested to the author to allow us to submit a text file with the links in that file and import it into Blog Solution. That would make our lives easier. Another thing to take note of is the way your links need to be formatted. Blog Solution imports links in a certain format and you need to get the title of each link in addition to the URL to make it work. This is tough work!
The biggest benefit of Blog Solution is that it automates every process of blogging and pinging. You don’t need multiple software or scripts to get it to work. It has a blog generator, rss posters, blog link poster, and pinging features all built into one system.
Some people seem to be able to get it working for them easily. After months of consulting with the authors via email and painful trial and error, Blog Solution 2 hasn’t worked out well enough for me to justify keeping 10 Blog Solution installations on my web host. The negatives outweigh the positives and I don’t think this the right solution for blogging and pinging at the moment.