If you are having problems with images or thumbnails, here are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot the problem. The first thing we need to get out of the way is to make sure you have the boxes checked to copy images locally or create thumbnails and that your post template contains the %image% or %thumbnail% variables. These are the default settings but sometimes those do get changed. Also make sure you have the latest version. Versions 2.3.381 and earlier had problems with image processing on some hosts.

1. Does your theme display images or thumbnails? Some themes only show text excerpts on the index page. A quick theme change can tell you if that is the case.

2. Are there images or thumbnails in your /wp-content/uploads directory? If there aren’t any image files in the directory for the current month, something might be preventing the image files or thumbnails from being saved.

3. Does the post show the image or thumbnail field? If you edit one of the posts that AutoBlogged added, in the custom fields section there should be an Image and/or thumbnail field that contains the URL of the image or thumbnail.

4. Did an error occur? If an error occured during the retrieval of an image, the post might have a custom field named Error that contains the error message received. If you have debug logging enabled, that too might contain additional error information. Your web directory might also contain an error_log file with additional information.

5. Is the feed valid? A surprising number of feeds simply aren’t valid or use non-standard namespaces. You can test your feed at feedvalidator.org. Another good test is to try out several other feeds to see if it is the feed itself that is causing the problem or if the problem occurs with all feeds.

6. Does the feed contain thumbnails? Some feeds may not have attached images although they do show up in the content field. Use the feed in the feed viewer to make sure it even contains images. You may want to try the %content% variable in your post template to get the full encoded content.

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Tags: autoblog-images image-problems images plugin-support valid-feeds

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.

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.

AutoBlogged has a built-in thumbnail feature that automatically creates thumbnails for images in posts. However, a number of premium themes use their own scripts such as TimThumb or Viva Thumbs for handling thumbnails. Because these scripts often use the same custom WordPress fields that AutoBlogged uses, you will sometimes see HTML code or an error message in place of the thumbnail image.

AutoBlogged automatically adds the custom fields image and thumbnail that contain the HTML IMG tag to display the image. However, some themes or thumbnail plugins also uses this custom field but expect it to contain a relative path to the image file.

For example, the image custom field might contain something like this:

<img src=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxxxxxxx.jpg” />

But your theme expects to see something like this:

/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxxxxxxx.jpg

Using the AutoBlogged custom fields feature you can easily change the format of the image or thumbnail custom fields to provide the image format you need. You may need to review the documentation for the theme or script to determine which custom field name it is looking for and how it wants image paths formatted.

Using Custom Fields

Depending on how your theme or thumbnail script expects to see the image path, you can use different custom field settings. Below are the three most common cases we see.

Note that depending on your theme or script, you may need to use a different custom field name such as Image, Thumbnail, etc. Keep in mind that in WordPress, case is important so a field named image is not the same as one named Image.

1. The script expects a full HTTP URL to the image

Set up a custom field with these values:

Custom Field: image

Custom Field Value: %image_url%

2. The script expects a file path relative to your web root

First, check the feed setting Save local copies of all images in the feed and uncheck the setting Create local thumbnails for each image. Then set up a custom field with these values:

Custom Field: image

Custom Field Value: %image_path%

3. The script expects a file path relative to the WordPress uploads directory:

First, check the feed setting Save local copies of all images in the feed and uncheck the setting Create local thumbnails for each image.

Next, set up a search and replace with these values:

Search for: /wp-content/uploads/

Replace with:  /

Then set up a custom field with these values:

Custom Field: image

Custom Field Value: %image_path%

The Custom Field Value uses the same syntax as post templates, so you can use any variable that you would use there. Here are the image-related variables available:

%image% – The full HTML IMG tag to display an image, for example <img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2712/xxxxxxxx.jpg” />

%image_url% – The full URL to the image, for example http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2712/xxxxxxxx.jpg

%image_path% – The relative path to the image, normally useful only if you cache images locally, for example /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg

%thumbnail% – The full HTML IMG tag to display the locally created image thumbnail, for example <img src=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg” />

%thumbnail_url% – The full URL to the thumbnail, for example http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg

%thumbnail_path% – The relative path to the thumbnail, normally useful only if you cache images locally, for example /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg

If you come across any situations where you need to set up custom fields to get your theme or plugins to work correctly, we’d like to hear about them in the comments below.

By default, AutoBlogged uses the original post title as the post for each new WordPress post it creates. However, you can customize how the title appears using our Custom Fields feature.

To do this, create a new custom field named title (note that it is lower case). For the Custom Field Value, you can enter anything you want. What makes this feature so powerful is that you can use the full AutoBlogged Post Template syntax here to include variables, use random values, or even use conditional values.

Here are some examples:

If you have come up with any cool title templates, please comment below, we’d love to see what you have!

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.

Issue
When using the DIYThemes Thesis theme, you may get an error like the following:

Warning: getimagesize() [function.getimagesize]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/public_html/wp-content/themes/thesis_151/lib/functions/multimedia_box.php on line 158

Problem
AutoBlogged automatically adds a custom field named image to every post it creates. This field contains the HTML code to display an image, including the IMG tag. The Thesis theme also uses a custom field named image that is uses to display thumbnails in various places. If it sees a custom field on a post named image, it will try to process that as an image path.

The problem is that since the AutoBlogged image field contains HTML, Thesis theme will return an error.

Solution
This issue has been fixed in AutoBlogged v2.6 and later. You can download this release here.

Note, however, that this upgrade will not modify existing posts. Unfortunately the only solution to fixing existing posts is to manually edit the custom field for each post so that it only contains the image URL or delete all AutoBlogged posts and start over the feed processing.

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.

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 proffesionalism of the site.

There are several post template variables you can use in your post template to show images:

%image% – Shows the first image full size
%images% – Shows all images full size
%thumbnail% – Shows a thumbnail of the first image
%thumbnails% – Shows thumbnails of all images

Note that there is also an undocumented feature that will allow you to access individual images. To enable this, open autoblogged.php and find this line near the top of the file:

define(“EXTRA_IMAGE_FIELDS”, false);

If you change the false to true, AutoBlogged will create custom fields for each image that you can use to directly access any image by number. In your post template the variables are %image_1%, %image_2%, %image_3%, etc. If you are accessing them from your theme, the custom fields are image_1, image_2, image_3, etc. We don’t enable this by default because we already add so many custom fields to each post.

We used this feature on one of our demo sites http://idolz.us. If you click on the title of an entry it will take you to the detail page. We modified the theme to show the custom fields thumbnail_1, thumbnail_2, and thumbnail_3.