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

RSS Feed Sources

• Configure multiple RSS feed sources with the ability to enable or disable individual feeds.
• Support for RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds.
• Integrated feed caching, HTTP Conditional GET support, and support for GZIP-compression to improve performance and reduce bandwidth usage.
• Support for dozens of RSS modules including Dublin Core, GeoRSS, ITunes, Media RSS, RSS 1.0 Content, W3C WGS84 Basic GEO, XML 1.0, and XHTML 1.0.
• Numerous pre-defined searches to locate articles via Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Flickr, YouTube, and others.
  
• RSS Feed autodiscovery–if you don’t know the exact feed URL, just enter the page address and AutoBlogged will find it for you.
• Built-in feed viewer to help with setting up and troubleshooting feed sources.
• Ability to override the automatically extracted feed data, such as author or source, with your own static values or values.
• Set the default post status to Published, Pending, Draft, or Private

Feed Processing

• Process feeds automatically using built-in pseudo cron feature so an external scheduler is not required.
• Set a range of intervals for random update scheduling.
• Manually process all feeds or one feed at a time.
• Preview feed processing without importing any posts.
• Disable cron operations without disabling the entire plugin.
• Allow other feeds to notify your autoblog of updates using an XML-RPC ping.
• Configure individual feeds to update every time AutoBlogged runs or after every each number of runs you set.
  
• Include all posts from each feed, set a limit on posts added per feed, or have AutoBlogged select random posts based on a percentage you set.
• Automatically create text-only excerpts based on number of words, sentences, or paragraphs.

Post Filtering

• Domain blacklist blocks posts from certain domains. Excellent way to block sites with spammy content, invalid HTML, or to allow webmasters to exclude their site from your blog.
• Block posts based on any portion of the URL to prevent posts from a specific type of sites such as forums or to block feeds from certain types of software.
• Keyword blacklists to exclude posts that contain keywords you specify.
• Duplicate post checking based on title and/or URL.
• Automatic filtering of malicious content in posts including SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
• Feed-specific filtering based on all words, any words, exact phrase, or none of the words specified.
  
• Feed-specific search and replace features using regular expressions to rewrite words, URLs, fix invalid content, replace affiliate IDs, etc.
• Truncate or filter out posts with long titles.
• Filter out posts where the titles are in all caps or where they contain multiple consecutive exclamation points or other punctuation.

Categories and Tags

• Assign each feed to one or more blog categories or subcategories or have AutoBlogged randomly select from a list of categories you specify.
• Search each post for existing blog categories and add them as additional categories or as tags on the post.
• Visits the original URL to extract additional tags not found in the feed using our own powerful tagging engine–an important SEO feature that will load your blog with related keywords.
  
• Add extra tags using the Yahoo! tagging API.
• Include categories from the original post and add missing categories to your blog if you choose.
• Tag blacklists prevent certain tags from appearing on a post.
• Common tags list increases the frequency of popular tags used by Technorati and other tagging sites or modify the list to add important tags for your niche.
• Provide a list of tags to randomly add to each post to increase the density of long tail phrases and other targeted keywords.
• Set the maximum and minimum tag length to ensure consistency and readability of your tags.
• Set the maximum number of tags to add to any post.

Authors

• Specify the author to use for new posts, assign a rando m author or use the name of the original author.
• If the original author does not exist as an author on your blog, add it, skip the post, randomly pick another author, or specify a default author.

• Use additional author information from your blog when adding new posts.

Post Templates

• Post templates let you randomly select from one or more post formats to ensure variety and to accommodate any number of site requirements.
• Apply different post templates to each of your feeds.
• Insert variables from the post, original feed, or any values you define.
• Random Select Lists to add variety to each post.
• Conditional Select Lists to show alternate fields if one is empty.
• Include images, video, flash and other content in your blog posts using an embedded video players.
• Specify a custom player for playing FLV or MP3 files.
• Build custom post templates to use with affiliate and other non-standard feed formats.
• Include text-only summaries or entire feed content as your post.
• Add custom HTML to each post to include NoFollow tags, Javascript, or even WordPress quick tags.
• Custom fields allow you to create your own post variables and include items as additional custom fields fin Wordpress.
• Automatic image, logo, and favicon extraction.
• Include any elements from the original feed based on dozens of supported RSS modules.
• And of course, you can simply show the original feed content untouched.

WordPress Integration

• Takes advantage of internal tagging and category engines to ensure strong keyword coverage and site navigation.
• Full integration with WordPress security and user permission features.
• Attribute posts to WordPress authors when incoming posts use that author’s name.
• Uses site information from WordPress blogroll when that site already exists in your blogroll.
• Automatically adds fields for images, videos, and thumbnails to support a variety of premium themes.

Other Features

• Set the HTTP Referer and User-Agent strings to use when visiting the original sites to advertise your site or provide opt-out instructions or contact info to other webmasters.
• Huge speed and performance improvements over previous versions.
• Commented PHP source code included.
• Support forum and e-mail support for all registered users.
• Free minor version updates included.

System Requirements

• PHP v4.3.2 or later
• WordPress v2.5 or later
• SimplePie Core Plugin v1.1 or later
• PHP cURL extension required
• PHP Zlib extension recommended

Note that servers with safe_mode enabled or an open_basedir set will have reduced image retrieval and tagging capabilities.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A common myth perpetuated in the SEO world is that you need to be careful with duplicate content to avoid penalties from search engines. The fact is that the Internet is full of duplicate content. Press releases, syndicated news stories, newsgroup and mailing list archives, and open source content all produce massive amounts of duplicated content. For example, take a popular Wikipedia entry and drop an excerpt into a search engine. You will see that many people use this content and often these pages rank higher than the original Wikipedia entry.

Consider that it would be a massive computing effort for any search engine to identify all pages on the Internet that are even 90% alike.  When you consider each web site has unique headers, footers, sidebars, and comments, chances are your site would be more like 50% similar to any other site even if you copied most of the articles from that site. Furthermore, if your autoblog pulls from many sources your site really is not a duplicate of any single site anymore. You can rest assured that there is no automatic detection that your site contains partial duplicate content from multiple sources.

However, we have seen many autoblogs that would never pass a manual inspection. If your site looks like spam then chances are that it will be penalized or even banned from the search engines. The problem is that if you aren’t courteous to other webmasters, it is really easy for them to report your site as spam, triggering a manual review by the search engines. If your web site looks like it does nothing more than steal content from others, chances are they will penalize you for being nothing other than duplicate content.

Here are some tips to help avoid any search engine penalties:

Add Value – Keep in mind, that there are many big web sites that are nothing but duplicated content.  Technorati, Google News, and many other sites are nothing but fancy autoblogs. If your site does nothing but repeat the content of a couple other blogs, you can expect to fail a manual review. We really don’t need more sites like that on the Internet. Create your autoblog with a purpose and give the user real value. A professional design and a personal touch can also make a big difference when it comes to manual reviews.

Be Courteous – The most important thing is to not anger other webmasters because they are they ones most likely to report you to the search engines. We find that it is best to not take every single article from another site without asking them permission. It is better to use the search-based feeds to pull your articles from a variety of different sites rather than directly pulling the feed from one or two specific blogs. You would be surprised to find that many bloggers are willing to let you pull excerpts from their feeds, especially if your site looks professional and has good page rank.

Still, you may find that some authors will complain even if you pull just one excerpt from their site. Although with just an excerpt you are probably safe from a legal perspective, but it is always best to show courtesy by apologizing and placing their site on the URL Blacklist in AutoBlogged so their articles don’t appear.

Make sure your web site has a way to contact you so that other webmasters will come to you first rather than just reporting you as spam to the search engines.

Fair Usage - When pulling articles from another site, be sure to keep your excerpts short and respect the copyrights of others. Some feeds include copyright notices and you can even include those in your post template. Always give credit to your sources and link to the original article. We also like to include a footer and about page that explains that the site is an autoblog and that the content was written by others. It is best to not take full articles, attempt to rewrite or spin articles, or use other blackhat methods that make it look like you are hiding something.

The User Experience - Although their are many algorithms that search engines use to rank content, it ultimately comes down to user experience. The whole point of having penalties is to prevent spammers from manipulating the system. If you build your site with real users in mind, and provide real value, chances are you won’t ever face any search engine penalties.