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.

Many premium WordPress themes make extensive use of thumbnails or featured images in your posts, but many feeds just don’t provide good images to work with. Rather than letting this feature go unused, there is a little trick you can use to add images to each post.

In one of our sample sites AdvertiserGuide.us, we are using the very cool Gazette Edition theme by WooThemes. The design of this theme relies heavily on the cross-fading featured images at the top, as well as thumbnails for each article, but most of the articles we were using simply didn’t have any associated images.

To fix this, we went to sites like istockphoto.com and www.sxc.hu to download both free and purchased stock photos that seemed relevant to the theme, yet generic enough to use with any article. We gathered 50 good photos, resized them all to the same size, and then renamed them 1.jpg through 50.jpg and uploaded them to our site.

Next, for each feed that doesn’t produce good images we added a custom field in AutoBlogged called Image. Note that the Gazette Edition theme specifically looks for images in this custom field. We set the value of the field as follows:

http://advertiserguide.us/img/[1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|
24|25|26|27|28|29|30|31|32|33|34|35|35|37|38|39|40|41|42|43|44|45|46|47|48|49|50].jpg

Below is a screen shot of that setting:

You can use post template syntax in your custom field values and bracketed values separated by pipes indicates to AutoBlogged to pick a random value from the list. In other words, AutoBlogged will randomly pick a number between 1 and 50 to create Image field values like these:

http://advertiserguides.us/img/13.jpg

http://advertiserguides.us/img/8.jpg

http://advertiserguides.us/img/41.jpg

http://advertiserguides.us/img/19.jpg

With just 50 images we do sometimes get two or more articles with the same picture on the front page but for the most part that isn’t that big of a deal and it greatly improves the look and professionalism of the site.