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.
