We are committed to supporting our customers and improving AutoBlogged as much as possible, however we would like to request your help in reducing our support load so we can focus on adding new features!

If you run into problems with AutoBlogged, we suggest you try the following before creating a support ticket:

1. Try disabling plugins. Disable all your plugins to see if there is a conflict. There are thousands of plugins written by all levels of programmers and some simply do not play well with other plugins or with current versions of WordPress. If the problem goes away, add the plugins back one at a time until you find the culprit.
2. Try another theme. Some themes do not implement all features or they perform non-standard functions that we have not tested. Verify that the problem exists on any theme you use.
3. Keep updated. Before submitting a support ticket try updating to the latest version of WordPress and make sure you have the latest copy of AutoBlogged. You can always download the latest version using your original download link. Also, if you are using PHP4, we strongly recommend upgrading to PHP5 as we will soon be phasing out support for PHP4.
4. Check your feed. Try viewing your feed using the built-in feed viewer, validate it at www.feedvalidator.org, or download the XML and view it in a text editor. A surprising number of feeds out there simply do not follow the standards.
5. Check online help. You can browse the online help documentation at http://autoblogged.com/online-help/. You might also find the post template tester useful: http://autoblogged.com/docs/template-test.php.
6. Search the forums. A quick, search of the forums at support.autoblogged.com might turn up a solution. If you don’t find it, you might want consider asking the question there so others might find an answer in the future.

If you still see the problem after these steps, we will do all we can to track it down. It is helpful if you give us as much information as possible and send your configuration if you feel comfortable doing so.

Here are some other tips to help you find solutions:

1. Try another host. If you have another web host available, check to see if the problem exists there also.
2. Search. Sometimes different plugins or scripts run into the same problems. A quick web search might turn up a solution.

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Tags: auto poster autoblog-plugin AutoBlogged problems troubleshooting

The Arthemia Premium theme is a perfect theme for autoblogs. It has a clean and professional look and is easy to navigate. Customizing the theme is fairly easy and a full-featured options page means you don’t need to edit too much of the theme itself.
The theme has nice drop-down navigation menus for categories you select and has built-in support for banner ads, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, and FeedBurner.

We have certified the Arthemia Premium theme for use with AutoBlogged and highly recommend it! You can see the Arthemia Premium theme in action at http://mspatchwatch.com.

AutoBlogged Integration

Arthemia Premium will automatically create a thumbnail for each post based on the value of the Image custom field as described in this article. AutoBlogged will automatically perform all these steps for you and create the Image custom field when it encounters an image in a post. The Arthemia theme will use this field to display post thumbnails if they exist.

Implementation Notes

• To use the auto thumbnail feature you must check the Save local copies of all images in the feed box under each feed’s settings.
• Under the Arthemia options page you must set the Thumbnail Assignment setting to Post Custom Field.
• The auto thumbnail feature currently only supports JPG images.
• Because the theme creates its own thumbnails you should remove %if:thumbnail%<p>%thumbnail%</p>%endif:thumbnail% from the post template.

Embedded Videos

The Arthemia theme currently only supports the automatic embedding of YouTube videos. If using an YouTube feed, you can take advantage of Arthemia’s built-in video support through AutoBlogged by creating a custom field in your feed settings named Video with the value %Video_URL%.  Note that if you do this, you should remove %if:video%<p>%video%</p>%endif:video% from your post template.

AutoBlogged is a powerful autoblogging plugin for WordPress that automatically creates blog posts from any RSS or Atom feed. Autoblogging is a great way to automate your WordPress posts so you can focus your efforts on earning money with your blog. With dozens of features, AutoBlogged is one of the most powerful autoblog software plugins available for WordPress and the best way to get automated blog content.

Features:

• Image and video support
• Custom post templates
• Advanced post filtering
• Enhanced tagging engine
• Regular Expression Search & Replace
• Create thumbnails for images
• Override feed data with your own values
• Fully supports WordPress 2.7 and later
• See AutoBlogged’s features

Furthermore, we have added a comprehensive online help, e-mail support, and customer forums to make sure you can quickly and easily get started autoblogging in WordPress! You can use AutoBlogged to build a blog network, as an automated video blog, to create topic portals, or aggregate RSS feeds. WP Autoblogs are a great way to quickly build keyword-dense content, earn money with your blog, and fully automate your blog posting. Even better, automated blog content is an excellent alternative to domain parking. Rather than showing a generic parked page with spammy-looking ads, you can provide real content, get indexed in search engines, build page rank, and generate traffic. You will be amazed how fast your domain value will grow!

Screenshots

More AutoBlogged screenshots…

Click on each thumbnail for a full-sized image.

Main Page

Edit Feed

Tag Options

Settings

Filtering

AutoBlogged is a WordPress plugin that automatically builds content in your WordPress blog using one or more external RSS or Atom feeds. AutoBlogged is a fast yet powerful tool for building a wide variety of web sites, such as portals, news aggregators, topic watchers, popular article finder, autoblog gallery, or simply an alternative for domain parking.

Getting Started with AutoBlogged

Configuration and Usage

• Main Page
• Edit Feeds Page
• Tag Options Page
• Settings Page
• Filtering Page

Advanced Topics

• AutoBlogged Tagging Engine
• Working with Tags and Categories
• Post Template Reference

If AutoBlogged doesn’t seem to be running automatically, you can use this article to help you troubleshoot the most common problems. AutoBlogged uses a pseudo-cron feature that depends on the theme and page visits.

1. Check the footer.php file

Not every WordPress theme properly calls the wp_footer() function. AutoBlogged needs this function to trigger the pseudo-cron feature to see if it is time to run again. To test this, try other themes or open your theme’s footer.php file in a text editor and look for the text wp_footer(). If it isn’t there, go ahead and add it if you know what you are doing or contact the theme author to add it for you.

2. Check your visitors

The AutoBlogged scheduler runs every time the page footer loads and therefore someone must visit the site every few hours for the articles to update. If you have a new site with few visitors, you may want to try signing up for a few free web site monitoring services to make sure you get enough hits to trigger the scheduler.

3. Check your plugins

Occasionally we run into plugins that conflict with AutoBlogged or themes that have functions that also conflict. To be sure there are no conflicts, try disabling all other plugins and use the default WordPress theme.

4. Check your feed

Some feeds might be causing errors that halt the feed processing, might be empty, or simply don’t have any new posts. Try running the script manually using the “Run AutoBlogged Now” link and try viewing the feed in the feed viewer.

5. Double-check your settings

Make sure that each feed is enabled and go into the Settings page and make sure that “Uncheck this if you wish to pause AutoBlogged.” is checked.

One of the key features of AutoBlogged is its ability to gather tags for each post, thereby increasing relevant keyword density and potentially improving your search engine rankings. There are a number of ways that AutoBlogged collects tags so we thought it would be helpful to better understand how this process works.

Feed Tags
Under the Tag Options admin panel there is an option to Use original tags from feed.

If you have this option checked, AutoBlogged will use SimplePie to extract all categories and tags from the feed item, including any tags found on any attachments. These tags are usually the most relevant because they typically are hand-selected by the author.

Adding Categories
If you edit the settings for a feed, under the Categories section there is an option If unselected blog categories appear in the post content… Add them as post tags. If this is checked, AutoBlogged will look at all the categories in your blog to see if the category text appears anywhere in the post content and will add those categories as tags on the post if they do appear.

For example, in your blog you might have a category called Microsoft Office. Under that you could have the subcategories Excel, Word, Access, and PowerPoint. Although you might have all posts from a feed go to the Microsoft Office category, you could check the Add them as post tags option to add Excel, Word, Access, or PowerPoint as tags on the post if those words appear in the post content.

This feature lets you use your site’s existing categories to improve the quality and relevance of tags on each post.

User-Assigned Tags
For each feed you can add one or more tags that AutoBlogged will randomly add to each post. Under the Tag Options admin panel you can also specify global tags that AutoBlogged will randomly add to posts from all feeds.

If you have certain keywords and phrases that you are targeting with search engines, these are the places to put them. We recommend always using the per-feed or global tags to improve search rankings and to improve the overall quality of tags. In fact, we never build an autoblog without first building a list of keywords using Google’s keyword tool.

Internal Tagging Engine
If you have the Use internal tagging engine to add tags from content option checked, AutoBlogged will visit the orignal URL of the article and try to extract relevant keywords to use as tags. This is useful because most feeds only have a short excerpt but this allows you to pull other important words from the full content. AutoBlogged does this by looking at meta keywords, titles, headings, bold words, rel tags, alt tags, link titles, and extracting phrases based on sentence structure. AutoBlogged will add weights to each of these tags and sort them accordingly.

The internal tagging engine can greatly increase relevant keywords, add long-tail phrases, and overall can improve your search rankings. Overall the tagging engine works quite well, but being an automated process it will sometimes produce sentence fragments that don’t look natural, especially when there isn’t much content in the original article. To improve the results, we have a tags.txt file that contains the most common categories and tags taken from various popular tagging sites. Tags from this file will rank higher if they appear in the article.

Note that the internal tagging engine can be very useful but it also puts more memory and processor load on AutoBlogged than any other feature. If you find that performance is an issue you should disable this feature and instead use the user-assigned tags to improve tagging. Note also that the tagging engine is highly biased towards the English language and you might not get the results you expect with other languages.

Yahoo! API
If you have this option selected and have entered a Yahoo! Application ID, AutoBlogged will then send the page content over to the Yahoo! API to extract additional tags. We have found the Yahoo! API good at identifying the content category but most often the words are too general to be worth the extra processing. In the near future we will have add-ins for other tagging engines as well.

Tag Filtering
Once AutoBlogged builds the tag list from the original content, it combines that list with the feed tags, category tags, and user-defined tags. It then goes through each tag to remove any that match the tags you have set on the Tag Filtering setting under Tag Options. AutoBlogged also loads the notags.txt file which is a series of regular expressions to remove words and phrases that are too general or that don’t work well as tags. At this point it also removes any tags that are tool long or too short based on your Maximum Tag Length and Minimum Tag Length settings.

At this point AutoBlogged probably has a big list of tags so it randomly shuffles them, which gives feed tags, category tags, user-assigned tags, and tags extracted from the content equal importance. It then trims the list based on the setting you have for Maximum Tags per Post, using a random number between that and half that value. In other words if you set a Maximum Tags Per Post setting of 12, it will trim the list to anywhere between 6 and 12 tags. Note that due to the shuffling process you could run the same article through AutoBlogged and get a different list of tags each time.

Our tagging engine is something we have spent considerable time on and we will continue to improve this feature in future versions of AutoBlogged.