14 DAY TRIAL // Today anyone can create a blog without programming knowledge by using online services that offer free hosting and ready made solutions for blog deployment. But for free hosted blogs, as well as in any other general case regarding free hosting services, the customization possibilities are limited.
Considering the case of blogs hosted on Blogger, the creation of a certain blog is simple : you just have to create an account, choose a template and then you can start posting articles. You can control all visual aspects and accessibility features of your blog, such as colors, fonts, template structure and more.
You are also able to define your own templates and add various new page elements in a given template using drag and drop. But you are not allowed to run server side scripts, PHP, ASP, JSP that could be useful when you want to automate the content publishing.
The possibilities to automate content publishing on Blogger are limited to displaying Google News headlines (with Newsreel page element), YouTube and Google videos (with Video Bar page element) and RSS feeds titles from various sources (with Feed element). For all automatic content added to your blog through the presence of these elements, you are allowed to modify only a few characteristics, such as the number of items and keywords for Google News headlines for example.
If you want to add full RSS feeds content to your blog without using Feed element instances (because it cannot perform this action), you still have a few alternatives. For example, you can convert the RSS feeds to HTML equivalent files and publish them as posts. In this case, you will have to manually update the feed content.
Another solution to automate the publishing of full RSS feed content would be the integration of the feed URL in an inline frame, but the search engine spiders will index the iframe content separately. In conclusion, by combining in a rational way all of these template elements with the appropriate methods to automate the content publishing on your blog, you will always have fresh content, which will be very appreciated by your site visitors.