1. Each participant may submit as many unique entries as desired.
2. Participation is free of charge. Employees and immediate families of AutoBlogged.com, contest sponsors, or any affiliate companies, or contest judges may not participate.
3. You must be at least 18 years old or have reached the age of majority in your country/state of citizenship, whichever is older, to participate in this contest. Entries received from individuals under the age of majority will not be judged.
4. The site you submit must use AutoBlogged as a significant feature to create content on the site, although it may be used to compliment regular content. All entrants must own or have rights to a licensed copy of AutoBlogged.
5. You may not use copyrighted material without permission. Your site must respect the copyright of others, attribute and link to all sources, and take in to consideration fair use doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use) by using only a small excerpt of content unless given permission to do otherwise. AutoBlogged.com is not liable for any copyright infringement on the part of the entrant.
6. The site should add value to the original content and include content from a variety of sources.  A generic feed aggregation won’t impress us much.
7. The winners of the contest will be decided primarily based primarily on creative and original use of AutoBlogged. Other deciding factors are concept, innovation, usefulness, and visual presentation. We will also take into consideration the votes from other users.
8. AutoBlogged.com reserves the right to deny any entries deemed to be abusive, harmful, harassing, pornographic or in other ways unsuitable for display at www.autoblogged.com. We reserve the right to use our discretion on this point.
9. AutoBlogged.com reserves the rights to, if necessary, modify the rules and/or proceedings of the contest, in order to address unforeseen cheating, fraud, etc.
10. By submitting an entry to this contest, the contestant grants AutoBlogged.com and its affiliate companies the rights to freely publish screen captures of submitted sites in printed or online media in relation to the contest, without remuneration and the contestant hereby irrevocably grants to AutoBlogged.com all right, title and interest in and to such creation of screen captures.
11. Privacy is of utmost concern and the contestant’s personal information other than the contestant’s name and web site URL will not be distributed outside of contest sponsor companies unless authorized by the contestant. Upon request we will also withhold the contestant’s name and web site URL.
12. Competition Prizes: The winning entries will receive the following: First Place Winner receives a USD $200 Visa gift card, a developer license for one premium theme at WooThemes.com, a license for one premium theme at Press75.com, one license for Movie Automator at goscript.net, one lifetime developer license of AutoBlogged, and one link to winning site from the AutoBlogged.com home page for a minimum of twelve months. Two runners-up will win each win one lifetime multi-site license of AutoBlogged, one license for the WP Uniquefier plugin at www.goscript.net, and one link each from a page at AutoBlogged.com.
13. Entries not complying with the contest rules are subject to disqualification without prior warning.

…

Tags: autoblog contest contest-rules

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.

Contest Announcement

NOTICE: This contest is now over, watch our site for future contest announcements!

Have you built a great-looking site using AutoBlogged or are you using our script in some unique and clever way? We are now scouring the web to find the best AutoBlogged sites out there and are excited to announce our first ever autoblogging contest!

From now until April 30, 2009 we are taking entries for the best autoblog sites out there. One winner and two runners up will receive hundreds of dollars in cash and prizes!

Prizes

First Place – One first place winner will win the prizes below (valued at almost $1000),

	A Visa gift card for USD $200
	A developer’s license for one premium WordPress theme at WooThemes.com ($150 value)
	A license for one premium WordPress theme at Press75.com ($75 value)
	A license for the Movie Automator plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Developer license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($395+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($150 value)

Runners Up – Two runners up will receive the following prizes (valued at almost $350)

	A Visa gift card for USD $50
	A license for the WP Uniquefier plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Multi-Site license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($129+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($120 value)

How We Judge

All winners will be chosen by a panel of judges consisting of one judge from AutoBlogged.com and three independent judges not affiliated with AutoBlogged.com.

The winners of the contest will be decided based on the following criteria:
• Overall creativity, originality, and concept – we want to be amazed.
• Creative and innovative use of AutoBlogged features – we want to show off what AutoBlogged can really do.
• General usefulness and value of the site – we don’t want to fill up the Internet with junk and we want to show that autoblogs aren’t just spam sites.
• Visual presentation, and usability – we want the site to look great and be easy to navigate.

For more information, please see our Contest Rules.

Note that this isn’t a design contest, the emphasis here is on the original and creative use of AutoBlogged, but we want to see sites that we are proud to show off as AutoBlogged example sites. Since this isn’t a design contest you are free to use any WordPress theme you want. Here are some premium WordPress themes we recommend.

Example Sites

To get things started we set up a few autoblogs of our own to show what kind of stuff we are looking for.

http://mspatchwatch.com

http://advertiserguide.us

http://idolz.us

http://windows2008security.com

http://quickgardening.com

We also suggest you visit the FAQ, Knowledge Base, and Tips section of our support forum. We will be adding new tips to that regularly during our contest.

How to Enter

1. The contest ends at 12:00 am MST (GMT -0700) on April 30, 2009.
2. Read the Contest Rules.
3. To enter, please create a new post in this forum

Sponsors

We would like to give a special thank you our contest sponsors!

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…

If you are interested in earning extra income by selling AutoBlogged, we have now launched our affiliate program.

All you need to do to get started is sign up to become an affiliate, and place our ad code onto your website. When a person clicks on the ads from your site and purchases a copy of AutoBlogged, you earn 20% of the sale. All commissions will be paid via Paypal fifteen days after the end of the month.

To help you promote AutoBlogged, we have a number of banners available. Feel free to download these or to link directly to these images on our servers.

468 x 60 Banners

125 x 125 Square Button

120 x 60 Button

120 x 90 Button

250 x 250 Square Popup

728 x 90 Leaderboard

720 x 300 Pop-Under

160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

The Feed Settings page allows you to individually configure and customize each source feed. From this page you can configure settings such as the category, tagging, filtering, and post templates.

General Settings

• Enabled – Determines whether the feed is included in each script run. Use this to temporarily disable a feed for testing or during feed configuration.
• Feed Type – This setting allows you to use one of the built-in handlers for various search engines. These handlers allow you to quickly configure a search without having to figure out the feed URL for the particular search engine.
• Search Keywords or RSS Feed URL – When using an RSS feed use this box to enter the full path to the feed. If using one of the built-in search handlers use this box to enter keywords or tags for your search. Note that if you do not have the exact feed URL you can often enter the web site’s main page and AutoBlogged will attempt to discover the actual feed URL.
• Title – The title is there for your own use to label the feed. This title will only show on the Feeds management page. IF you do not enter a title, the Feeds page will create a title for you.Default Status – When adding new posts from a feed, you can choose to have them automatically published, saved as a draft, saved as a private post, or with a status of pending.

Categories and Tags

• Assign posts to this category – All posts created from a feed must be assigned to at least one category. This setting determines the category for all posts in this feed.
• If other blog categories appear in the post - When processing a feed, AutoBlogged will check to see if any of the existing blog categories appear in the post. If they do, you can choose to 1) assign those categories to the post and 2) add those categories as tags for the post. This feature is particularly useful if your blog has categories with subcategories. You can assign the feed to the main category and let AutoBlogged automatically add the subcategories if found. For example, you may have a blog category titled Windows with subcategories XP and Vista. You can assign the category Windows to the feed and allow it to automatically assign the categories XP or Vista if those words appear in the post. This feature can add true value to your blog by intelligently gathering and categorizing content found on the web.
• Additional Tags – With an autoblog that does nothing more than show excerpts and point to other sites your site offers little value for users and little uniqueness for search engines. The Additional Tags feature allows you to create a list of keywords, phrases, or search terms that will randomly be added as tags to each post. Not only does this improve your search engine results, it helps users to find relevant content based on the additional keywords you provide.

Include Posts that Contain

This section allows you to perform additional keyword filtering on your feed when the source does not provide such a feature. For example, you may be using an affiliate feed and only want to display those posts that contain the keyword coupon.

Note that any extra processing you perform will affect the load, overhead, and speed of the script. If possible try to use any filtering capabilities of the source feed before using the feed-level filtering.

All of these searches are performed on each field extracted from the feed, it does not do any filtering based on the content of the original page.

Enter lists of words separated by spaces or commas. To enter a phrase that includes spaces or commas, enclose that phrase in quotes.

• All these words - All words in this box must appear in the feed in order for the post to pass filtering checks.
• Any of these words - If any of the listed words appear, the post will pass filtering checks.
• The exact phrase - If the exact phrase appears in the post, it will pass filtering checks. Note that if you would like to enter multiple phrases in this box, each phrase must be enclosed in quotes.
• None of these words - If any of these words appear in the post it will not pass the filter checks.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields are a power feature that allow you to override field values, supply values for empty fields, or create new fields that you can use as variables in templates. For example, you may have a feed where all authors show as Admin, which is fairly common with blogs. If you know the author’s real name, you can create a custom field named author and enter the name of the author you wish to use.

All custom fields will also override extracted values or will be added as additional fields to the WordPress post so you can modify your WordPress theme to display these values.

Note that Custom Fields are processed before Post Templates and therefore the fields you create can be referred to from within your templates.

• Custom Field – This is the name of the field you wish to set.
• Custom Field Value – This is the value you wish to assign to the field. This can be a static value or you can use the post template syntax to create more complex scenarios.

Post Templates

Post Templates are the key to customizing your blog and giving it a fresh and natural appearance. Post Templates have a flexible syntax that allows for random selections, conditional content, variable insertion, and loops. For more information on Post Templates, see Post Template Reference

Search and Replace

The Search and Replace feature allows you to modify the content of a feed based on Regular Expression searches. With this feature you can do things such as rewrite words, enforce naming standards, insert affiliate ID’s, correct non-standard feeds, create unique content, or just about anything else you can imagine. Search and Replace uses the PCRE syntax.

• Search for – The search term or regular expression to find.
• Replace with – The expression to use for replacing the search term.

Note that the Search and Replace feature uses Regular Expressions so you must escaoe any special characters in your search pattern with a slash (\) character. The special characters that need escaping are \^.$|()[].

For example, if you want to seach for autoblogged.com and replace it with www.autoblogged.com, you would use these values:
Search for: autoblogged\.com
Replace with: www.autoblogged.com

If you want to turn all instances of wikipedia.com into a hyperlink, use these values:
Search for: wikipedia\.com
Replace with: <a href=”wikipedia.com”>wikipedia.com</a>

Note that if your search expression contains multiple grouped matches, the Replace operation will only be performed on the primary match. For more precise control over replacement, you can use backreferences in your replace expression.

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

Issue

By default WordPress will send a notification to any external blog posts referenced in your site, which show up as comments to the original post.  Sometimes you may not want to notify other blogs when you autoblog their posts.

Solution

To disable pingbacks and trackbacks, go to the Discussion settings in WordPress and uncheck the option Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)

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.

Autoblogging is the term we use to automatically create content for blogs, as opposed to manually writing individual posts. In the case of AutoBlogged, you can create posts based on the contents of another RSS feed. Since you can get RSS feeds on just about anything, you can easily find content to automatically add to your WordPress blog. For example, you could get a feed from Google Blog Search that returns articles written by other bloggers on a particular topic. These articles will appear on your blog as short excerpts with a link attributing the original source.

Technorati.com and Google News are both examples of essentially how an autoblog looks.

Autoblogs are useful for many things, but they are a great way to aggregate articles on a particular niche topic for your blog. By pulling feeds from multiple sources and using smart searches and filtering you can provide valuable portals to your niche topic. Autoblogs can also work well to build blogs from multiple affiliate feeds or to augment your own content.

Autoblogs ensure keyword-rich, fresh content that will greatly improve your search engine results.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Splogs?

While many people do use autoblogs as spam blogs–or splogs–autoblogging itself is not spamming. Splogs are spam in the sense that they are spamming search engines to build backlinks or drive traffic to affiliate links, increase ptc ad clicks, or even to spread malware. Splogs quickly get blacklisted on search engines and work based on volume and rapidly creating new splogs. Splogs are a blackhat SEO technique that do not produce quality long-term results and are generally annoying for anyone using a search engine.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Scrapers?

Scraping is similar to autoblogging in the sense that it uses content from other web sites. Scraping, however, is different in that it uses a significant amount of content from targeted sites and often is combined with rewriting techniques to obscure the original content while maintaining the topical context.

Autoblogging is not about stealing content, but rather sifting through, aggregating, and linking to the world’s content to create added value.