Issue

You may find that AutoBlogged is not posting the latest posts from a feed. This usually occurs when the feed is cached and is not showing the latest updates.

Solutions

• Some large sites will cache their RSS feeds, particularly if you retrieve the feed too often. Try reducing your update frequency. If that doesn’t help, there may not be much you can do.
• If you are using a complex Yahoo! Pipes feed, you may not always be receiving the latest copy due to the time it takes to process the feed. Try subscribing to that feed using various RSS readers to keep the feed freshly updated.
• Set the RSS cache timeout to zero (“0″) on the AutoBlogged Settings page

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Tags: cached caching latest-posts rss-feed wordpress-posts

The quality of your autoblog highly depends on the feeds that drive your site. Poor quality feeds can quickly fill your site and certainly will give visitors the impression that your site is spam.

So here are some links to help you out:

Yahoo! Pipes – This is by far the most powerful RSS aggregator with great filtering capabilities. You can even pull content from a CSV file and convert it to a RSS feed.

MySyndicaat – Similar to Yahoo! Pipes. Easier to use but not nearly as powerful.

BoardTracker – Allows you to search discussion boards and save that search as a RSS feed. I use this to watch forums for people looking for an autoblog script!

Feed43 – Another powerful service that lets you extract content from a regular HTML page and convert it to a RSS feed. I have used this in the past to pull posts from forums that do not support RSS. Its a little complicated at first but once you get used to it, you won’t be able to live without this. Recently I made myself a feed to monitor the “wanted to buy” forums on a number of domain boards, fed those feeds into Yahoo! Pipes for some filtering, then into my RSS reader.

AutoBlogged should work with just about any valid RSS or Atom feed and often still works with the many malformed feeds out there.

If there is a particular feed you want to use with AutoBlogged, you can use the following resources to check the feed:

• Our feed viewer is the best indication that AutoBlogged will be able to parse the feed.
• Check FeedValidator.org to confirm that your RSS or Atom feed is properly formatted.

For more issues with troubleshooting feeds, see http://autoblogged.com/kb/rss-feeds/troubleshooting-feeds/

For information on how to access custom RSS fields in feeds, see http://autoblogged.com/kb/post-templates/custom-namespaces/

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.

Issue

A feed that you are trying to use is not valid or uses a non-standard configuration that AutoBlogged does not handle properly. Because we use SimplePie to parse RSS feeds, the best we can do is report bugs for them to fix. ……

One question we are sometimes asked is how many RSS feeds can AutoBlogged handle?

The answer is that there is no quick answer to this question. The only real limitation is how long the server will allow scripts to run before it times out. The timeout issue is determined by the web server software and the PHP settings. By default, many servers will timeout after thirty seconds.

Therefore, the number of feeds you can add depends on how many entries the feeds have, how often it is updates, how powerful the server is, and how you configure autoblogged. On a shared host we wouldn’t recommend running more than 5 feeds at a time. But with feeds that aren’t updated much you can add quite a few more, because most of the work isn’t checking the feeds for new articles, but when it has to actually process those new items.

One thing to consider is that WordPress already has quite a bit of overhead, especially on a blog that gets a lot of hits. Because the work required to retrieve feeds, process the xml, create tags, and add posts is significant, you should always be careful with adding too many feeds. A busy WordPress site is already a big load on the server, so you need to consider the extra load required to import the RSS feeds into WordPress.

If you want to set up more than 5-10 feeds, we recommend offloading part of the processing using an external application such as Yahoo Pipes, mysyndicaat, or feedrinse to aggregate the feeds and do any necessary filtering there. These tools will output a single aggregated, sorted, and filtered RSS feed that you can use with AutoBlogged.

That isn’t to say AutoBlogged can’t handle more feeds. We have seen a number of installations with 30-50 feeds that worked perfectly. As we said before, it really depends on the feeds you use. A feed with dozens of posts a day will always require more processing that a feed with only a few posts a week.

Duplicate posts are an issue that seem to constantly plague autoblogging and similar autoposting WordPress plugins. There have been numerous causes for this problem in the past and we are constantly working on methods to fix this. We have had good success combating this problem, but occasionally some server configuration or WordPress update will reintroduce this bug.

Background

When AutoBlogged parses items in a feed, the first thing it does is grab the item’s title and link. Next, it will take those two values and check the database to see if those posts already exist in your WordPress blog. AutoBlogged will search the database for duplicate titles and/or links, depending on which options you have checked on the Filtering Options page.

When it searches for duplicate titles, it tries searching for the literal title as well as the sanitized form of the title using the WordPress sanitize_title and the  sanitize_title_with_dashes functions. If duplicate link checking is enabled, it will search the database for the exact link the post uses. Depending on which options you have enabled, it could do up to five checks for each post.

AutoBlogged should get one of three responses from the database: either the title and/or link already exists, an empty recordset that indicates they don’t exist, or an error message that something failed while processing the request.

The problem is that sometimes AutoBlogged gets back an empty recordset when a post exists rather than a positive result or an error message.

Causes

Most often the reason the database returns a false result is because some error or timeout occurred but the database did not return an error message. We have found this to be the case with some web server configurations. The problem is that by not returning an error, it is very difficult to debug the problem.

Another possible cause is that the character set that WordPress uses does not match that of the database therefore the duplicate checks never match any titles.

Solutions

To solve the problem with duplicates, we suggest you first make sure you have the latest AutoBlogged release. We are always improving the dupe checking code and this might be all you need to fix the problem. If that doesn’t do it, try the following solutions in order:

1. Try optimizing (or even repairing) all of your database tables using phpMyAdmin or your hosting control panel. About half the time this fixes the duplicates problem.
2. Check to make sure your database is not overloaded. If you ever see database errors on your WordPress site, this is very likely what is causing duplicate posts as well. You might also want to check the runtime configuration and system variables for possible problems using phpMyAdmin. There are links on the phpMyAdmin main page to show this information. There are a lot of settings here that affect MySQL performance and you may need an expert to help you out here if you suspect this is the problem.
3. Check the resource load on the server itself to make sure it isn’t overworked or maxing out its resources. This is fairly common with cheap shared hosting accounts.
4. If you have 10,000 or more posts in your blog or your site gets more than 3,000 visitors per day, you may simply need more powerful hardware. WordPress can be sluggish when there are too many posts or when it gets too busy and this could cause database connection failures.
5. Try configuring WordPress to use the default database character set by opening wp-config.php and removing or commenting out this line:

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

If none of these solutions work for you, perhaps the easiest solution is to find a different hosting company. We actually very rarely see the problem on any of our test servers and we have noticed that it often occurs with cheap or oversold hosting companies. We have always had good results with HostNine and A Small Orange.

If you manage your own web server, you may need to find a MySQL expert to help you optimize the database for your type of load.

As we mentioned before, this is a problem that we are constantly monitoring and always working to eliminate. If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, we are happy to help you debug it, especially if it helps us find new fixes to prevent it.

Issue

AutoBlogged is having problems processing one particular RSS feed you are using or is unable to open the feed in the feed viewer.

Solutions

• Try opening the feed URL directly in your web browser to make sure you have the correct URL.
• Check FeedValidator.org to confirm that your RSS or Atom feed is properly formatted.
• Try opening the feed in different browsers to make sure it isn’t a browser issue.
• Try viewing your feed using the SimplePie demo to make sure it isn’t an issue with SimplePie.
• Check the SimplePie FAQ to make sure it isn’t a known problematic feed.

More Information

FeedBurner Issues:

• http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/
• http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2009/01/older-known-issues-workarounds.html
• http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2009/01/http-502-error-code-received-on-some.html
• http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2009/01/older-known-issues-workarounds.html

Blogger.com/Blogspot.com Issues:

• http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/browse?hl=en

Also see Workarounds for Poor Quality Feeds

We have encountered a bug that causes AutoBlogged to terminate unexpectedly when trying to create a thumbnail for an image. When creating thumbnails, AutoBlogged calls the WordPress function image_resize which in turn calls wp_load_image which in turn calls the PHP function imagecreatefromstring. All of these functions have proper error handling code, however there is a bug that sometimes causes imagecreatefromstring to halt with a segmentation fault when processing an invalid image.

We do not know the exact details of when and where the problem occurs, but we do know that a number of bugs have been reported related to segmentation faults with imagecreatefromstring. Note that the problem occurs due to an error while processing an image which could mean an invalid image or some other problem. The image may display fine in your browser yet could still be causing the segfault in the GD library.

Unfortunately, being a PHP bug there is nothing we can do to fix this error and because it is a fatal error we cannot just catch it and move on. All we can do is recommend that you check your PHP version to make sure you have the latest release. Otherwise, the only other solution is if you encounter this is to manually skip the post with the invalid image file using the Filtering options to create a URL blacklist or Keyword blacklist entry.

Fortunately this problem is quite rare but we did want to document the issue.

We have been receiving lots of feedback from our customers and we are surprised with the variety of sites people have built with AutoBlogged. Autoblogs have traditionally had a bad name as spammy or as content thieves but some of you have used AutoBlogged to build some very useful web sites.

One thing we are seeing is people using AutoBlogged in ways we really never considered. AutoBlogged works best when you give it two or three RSS feeds based on various searches. However, when you load up hundreds of feeds and have complex filtering requirements, you might notice a significant hit on your site’s performance.

Part of the problem is that PHP, as an interpreted language, will always require more overhead than a compiled application. Part of the problem is that WordPress is a complex platform that already does an enormous amount of processing for each page view. Part of it is that AutoBlogged does quite a bit of work to process and tag each post.

While much has been done to optimize the performance of AutoBlogged, how you configure the plugin can have a significant impact on the load it puts on the server, especially when the plugin adds a large number of posts each day.

If you want to get maximum performance from AutoBlogged, here are some things you can do:

1.  Remote Filtering - Because all filtering tasks increase script processing load, try to limit your use of feed-level filters or search and replace operations. Filtering requires repetitive searching that could potentially have an impact on a busy site.Try to offload as much filtering as possible on the remote end.

For example, use advanced search options with Google Blog Search to filter out unwanted words, limit to a specific date range, or specify the language. Then under Filtering, clear all the words from the keywords blacklist. Also consider using Yahoo! Pipes, MySyndicaat, or another feed aggregator with filtering capabilities to fine-tune your source feed. Anything you can do to move the processing off your server means that much less work your server has to do.

The feed level filters and search and replace filters are useful for simple processing but can quickly slow down the script if you overuse that feature. If you need more advanced filtering capabilities, we suggest using Yahoo! Pipes, MySyndicaat, or another feed aggregator with filtering capabilities.

2.  Limit the Number of Feeds – Although there is no specific limit to the number of feeds AutoBlogged can handle, adding too many feeds can slow down the process and possibly result in script timeouts. Again, an external feed aggregator is an excellent solution.

3.  Do not Retrieve the Original Article – AutoBlogged by default will visit the URL of the original article in order to gather additional keywords to use as tags. Skipping this step will save a significant amount of CPU usage, will reduce network traffic, but will limit the effectiveness of the built-in tagging engine. Under Tag Options, only check the box to use original tags from feed. This will save a visit to the original URL and the subsequent parsing of tags. Instead of automatically parsing tags from the original URL, under Tag Options, use the Additional Tags box as a random source for tags for each post.

4.  Do not Search for Existing Categories – AutoBlogged has two options for dealing with existing blog categories that appear in an article: it can add that category to the post or it can add it as a tag. This is very useful for automatically categorizing each post but it also means that AutoBlogged must loop through each blog category to see if it exists in the post.

5.  Limit Duplicate Matching – To prevent duplicate posts from appearing AutoBlogged will search for duplicates based on the post title or based on the original link. Filtering by title works best in some situations but filtering by link works better in others. We do not recommend using both at the same time because AutoBlogged must perform a database lookup for each one.

6.  Limit Your Plugins – If you find that WordPress in general is slow, you should take a look at your plugins and consider only enabling the bare minimum. Remember that most of these plugins will run with every page load.

7.  Limit the Features you Use – If you have a very busy blog and limited CPU resources, you may have to limit the AutoBlogged features you use. AutoBlogged can do quite a bit but sometimes you may want it not do so much to help performance. Image and video processing, checking to see if links already exist in your blog, checking to see if the author exists, and saving images locally all require extra processing that can slow things down. At some point you need to decide which is most important: features, performance, or the amount of money you spend on server equipment.