You may run across a feed that gets truncated when imported into WordPress. Typically, the cutoff occurs after a non-breaking space ( ) in the feed. Sometimes this issue also shows up as an AutoBlogged post that contains the feed content but does not contain the attribution link to the original article.

Problem

In our research of this issue, we have determined that the entire post is intact when we pass it on to the WordPress API. The cutoff occurs during WordPress’ handling of the post. Although this is technically a WordPress issue, we do know that the problem is due to non-breaking spaces so we can just trim those off before we pass the post to WordPress. We will address this issue in our next AutoBlogged update.

In the meantime, however, we have identified a workaround that does fix this issue.

Solution

Until our next AutoBlogged update, you can use the following workaround to deal with this issue:

First, go into the settings for your feed and scroll to the Search and Replace section at the bottom of the page. In the Search for box, enter   and in the Replace with box type a single space as shown below:

After you set up this search and replace, you need to modify your post template, replacing all instances of %excerpt% or %content% with %description%.

For example, your new post template may look like this:

<p>%description%</p>

%if:video%<p>%video%</p>%endif:video%
%if:thumbnail%<p>%thumbnail%</p>%endif:thumbnail%

[Read more here|Read the original here|Read more from the original source]
<a target="_blank" href="%link%" title="%title%">%title%</a>

After making these changes, you should no longer have issues with truncated posts.

…

Tags: autoblogger cut-off nbsp posts rss-feed Search and Replace truncated wp autoblog

If you try to manage your feeds in AutoBlogged the find that the Edit buttons or other graphics are missing, it may be an issue of corrupt files or incorrect file permissions.

Solution:
Try uploading all of the AutoBlogged files again to the /wp-content/plugins/autoblogged directory. You may need to delete all the existing files first. Note that this will not affect your AutoBlogged settings or any feed data.

If this does not help, check all of the file permissions to ensure that the web server process can access them. It may also be helpful to check any web server and error logs for clues to what is happening.

Note also that if you did not properly retain the directory structure when you extracted the files, this can also occur. The /wp-content/plugins/autoblogged directory structure should be as follows:

/autoblogged

+-  /cache

+-  /img

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.