AutoBlogged is a powerful autoblogging plugin for WordPress that automatically creates blog posts from any RSS or Atom feed. Autoblogging is a great way to automate your WordPress posts so you can focus your efforts on earning money with your blog. With dozens of features, AutoBlogged is one of the most powerful autoblog software plugins available for WordPress and the best way to get automated blog content.

Features:

• Image and video support
• Custom post templates
• Advanced post filtering
• Enhanced tagging engine
• Regular Expression Search & Replace
• Create thumbnails for images
• Override feed data with your own values
• Fully supports WordPress 2.7 and later
• See AutoBlogged’s features

Furthermore, we have added a comprehensive online help, e-mail support, and customer forums to make sure you can quickly and easily get started autoblogging in WordPress! You can use AutoBlogged to build a blog network, as an automated video blog, to create topic portals, or aggregate RSS feeds. WP Autoblogs are a great way to quickly build keyword-dense content, earn money with your blog, and fully automate your blog posting. Even better, automated blog content is an excellent alternative to domain parking. Rather than showing a generic parked page with spammy-looking ads, you can provide real content, get indexed in search engines, build page rank, and generate traffic. You will be amazed how fast your domain value will grow!

Screenshots

More AutoBlogged screenshots…

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Category: AutoBlogged Plugin

Tags: autoblog automatic blog posts rss to blog WordPress AutoBlog Plugin WordPress Plugin

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.

Issue
This error is caused when you use the WordPress upload feature to install a plugin from the Add New plugin page. Unfortunately, this feature cannot handle a zip file that contains folders so it places the files in a subdirectory where WordPress cannot see the plugin header files to activate the plugin.

For example, the autoblogged.php file would be installed in a directory like this:
/wp-content/plugins/2.xx/autoblogged/autoblogged.php

Background
Since WordPress v2.8, there has been a feature to upload and install new plugins directly through the WordPress admin back-end by browsing for them on your local hard drive. WordPress will upload the zip file, extract it to the /plugins directory, and then try to activate the plugin. The problem is that since the AutoBlogged zip file contains the plugin files in a subdirectory, WordPress will create one directory with the name of the zip file and then the /autoblogged directory under that. Since that places the plugin file two directories deep, WordPress cannot find it and reports an invalid header. This same problem occurs with any plugin that uses subdirectories in the zip file, and there are many that do.

Solution
To correctly install AutoBlogged, you should use FTP or your hosting control panel’s file manager to upload the autoblogged directory directly under the wp-content/plugins directory. In other words, the full path to autoblogged.php should be:
/wp-content/plugins/autoblogged/autoblogged.php

If you have already used the WordPress upload feature to upload the plugin, you can fix it by moving the /autoblogged directory directly under the /wp-content/plugins directory.

Comments
Obviously, we could fix this ourselves by placing all the files in the zip file without any subfolders, which we tried for a short time, but then found that many users were confused about where to put the files when uploading them via ftp. By zipping them into the autoblogged directory it is pretty intuitive to upload that entire /autoblogged directory to the plugins directory in WordPress. Another benefit is that it allows us to place other files in our zip file that don’t need to be uploaded to your server.

We personally consider this to be a WordPress issue. One solution would be for them to recognize that zip files might actually contain subdirectories and unzip the files accordingly. Another solution would be to allow WordPress to activate plugins that are one or more directories deep under the /plugins directory. And of course, they really should fix their error message saying that our plugin header is invalid when in fact they just can’t find the file that they uploaded to the wrong place.

See Also:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/280262

http://ijstyles.com/wordpress-2-8-issues-how-to-solve-plugin-does-not-have-a-valid-header/

http://wordpress.org/search/%22The+plugin+does+not+have+a+valid+header%22?forums=1

For our next major release we are planning an eBay auction plugin module that will allow you to access all details for an eBay auction but for now it still is possible to work with the basic information of an eBay feed. The feeds that eBay publishes are a bit non-standard so they do require a few extra steps to get them to work. Here is a quick tutorial on how to do this.

1. Create a Feed

The first step is to create an RSS feed for the keywords you are searching for. To do this, go to http://search.ebay.com/ws/search/AdvSearch?sofindtype=1 and enter the details you wish to filter on. Notice that near the bottom of the page is an option to enter affiliate tracking tracking information so that you can earn commissions from referrals.

Click on Search to get the results and look for the orange RSS icon on your browser’s address bar. Click on that icon to go to the RSS feed URL. This is the URL you will enter into AutoBlogged.

When you configure your feed in AutoBlogged, you will want to edit the default post template. Near the bottom of the feed settings screen is a post template box. Since the eBay feeds don’t provide a description, you may want to make your post template simply the title and show a thumbnail by entering this as your post template:

%thumbnail%<br />
%title%

2. Update Your Modules.php File

If you are using AutoBlogged 2.4.22 (the current release as of this writing) or earlier, you need to download the Modules.php file attached at the bottom of this article and upload it to your autoblogged directory. This file contains the namespace to access the special eBay fields.

3. Create Custom Fields

At this point you can use any of the following variables in your post template:

• %rx:CurrentPrice%
• %rx:EndTime%
• %rx:BidCount%
• %rx:AuctionType%
• %rx:ItemCharacteristic%

Although you can use these directly in your post template, you will find that the data in the CurrentPrice and EndTime fields aren’t properly formatted for display. For example, the CurrentPrice will not display decimal places so a value of $14.99 will appear as 1499. Furthermore, the End

Time appears as a number timestamp, not a formatted date. For that reason, the best solution is to save each field as a custom field on the post that we can access later.

To do this, at the bottom of the feed page in AutoBlogged, fill out the Custom Fields section as shown below:

Note that the Custom Fields section only provides two new entry boxes at a time so you will need to save the feed to get two more. Also note that if you don’t plan on using any of the above fields in your post, you may leave those out.

At this point AutoBlogged will not display any of this extra information but it will save the values to each post as custom fields. If you run AutoBlogged now and edit one of the posts, you will see these values as custom fields. To display this information on your site you will need to modify your WordPress theme.

4. Modify Your Theme

To view the eBay custom fields, you need to modify one or more files in your theme, depending on where you want these values displayed. For example, if you want them shown on your home page, you will need to modify index.php, or whatever file your theme uses for the main loop. If you want to modify single posts, edit the file single.php. Note that not all themes are the same, but these instructions will work for most themes.

When you edit the file, you can usually find the place where posts are displayed by searching for the_title(). Once you determine where to place the information, you can access the post’s custom fields with this code:

Current price:
<?PHP echo number_format((get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘CurrentPrice’, true)/100), 2, ‘.’, ‘,’); ?>

End Time:
<?PHP echo date(‘M j g:i a’, doubleval( substr(get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘EndTime’, true), 0, -3))); ?>

Bid Count:
<?PHP echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘BidCount’, true); ?>

Auction Type:
<?PHP echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘AuctionType’, true); ?>

Item Characteristic:
<?PHP echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘ItemCharacteristic’, true); ?>

To see an example of this in action, we have attached to this post a modified index.php from the Default WordPress theme. Below is a an example of how this would appear:

Of course not all themes will be this simple so it may help to know HTML and/or PHP to tweak this how you need it.

1. Each participant may submit as many unique entries as desired.
2. Participation is free of charge. Employees and immediate families of AutoBlogged.com, contest sponsors, or any affiliate companies, or contest judges may not participate.
3. You must be at least 18 years old or have reached the age of majority in your country/state of citizenship, whichever is older, to participate in this contest. Entries received from individuals under the age of majority will not be judged.
4. The site you submit must use AutoBlogged as a significant feature to create content on the site, although it may be used to compliment regular content. All entrants must own or have rights to a licensed copy of AutoBlogged.
5. You may not use copyrighted material without permission. Your site must respect the copyright of others, attribute and link to all sources, and take in to consideration fair use doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use) by using only a small excerpt of content unless given permission to do otherwise. AutoBlogged.com is not liable for any copyright infringement on the part of the entrant.
6. The site should add value to the original content and include content from a variety of sources.  A generic feed aggregation won’t impress us much.
7. The winners of the contest will be decided primarily based primarily on creative and original use of AutoBlogged. Other deciding factors are concept, innovation, usefulness, and visual presentation. We will also take into consideration the votes from other users.
8. AutoBlogged.com reserves the right to deny any entries deemed to be abusive, harmful, harassing, pornographic or in other ways unsuitable for display at www.autoblogged.com. We reserve the right to use our discretion on this point.
9. AutoBlogged.com reserves the rights to, if necessary, modify the rules and/or proceedings of the contest, in order to address unforeseen cheating, fraud, etc.
10. By submitting an entry to this contest, the contestant grants AutoBlogged.com and its affiliate companies the rights to freely publish screen captures of submitted sites in printed or online media in relation to the contest, without remuneration and the contestant hereby irrevocably grants to AutoBlogged.com all right, title and interest in and to such creation of screen captures.
11. Privacy is of utmost concern and the contestant’s personal information other than the contestant’s name and web site URL will not be distributed outside of contest sponsor companies unless authorized by the contestant. Upon request we will also withhold the contestant’s name and web site URL.
12. Competition Prizes: The winning entries will receive the following: First Place Winner receives a USD $200 Visa gift card, a developer license for one premium theme at WooThemes.com, a license for one premium theme at Press75.com, one license for Movie Automator at goscript.net, one lifetime developer license of AutoBlogged, and one link to winning site from the AutoBlogged.com home page for a minimum of twelve months. Two runners-up will win each win one lifetime multi-site license of AutoBlogged, one license for the WP Uniquefier plugin at www.goscript.net, and one link each from a page at AutoBlogged.com.
13. Entries not complying with the contest rules are subject to disqualification without prior warning.

Contest Announcement

NOTICE: This contest is now over, watch our site for future contest announcements!

Have you built a great-looking site using AutoBlogged or are you using our script in some unique and clever way? We are now scouring the web to find the best AutoBlogged sites out there and are excited to announce our first ever autoblogging contest!

From now until April 30, 2009 we are taking entries for the best autoblog sites out there. One winner and two runners up will receive hundreds of dollars in cash and prizes!

Prizes

First Place – One first place winner will win the prizes below (valued at almost $1000),

	A Visa gift card for USD $200
	A developer’s license for one premium WordPress theme at WooThemes.com ($150 value)
	A license for one premium WordPress theme at Press75.com ($75 value)
	A license for the Movie Automator plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Developer license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($395+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($150 value)

Runners Up – Two runners up will receive the following prizes (valued at almost $350)

	A Visa gift card for USD $50
	A license for the WP Uniquefier plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Multi-Site license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($129+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($120 value)

How We Judge

All winners will be chosen by a panel of judges consisting of one judge from AutoBlogged.com and three independent judges not affiliated with AutoBlogged.com.

The winners of the contest will be decided based on the following criteria:
• Overall creativity, originality, and concept – we want to be amazed.
• Creative and innovative use of AutoBlogged features – we want to show off what AutoBlogged can really do.
• General usefulness and value of the site – we don’t want to fill up the Internet with junk and we want to show that autoblogs aren’t just spam sites.
• Visual presentation, and usability – we want the site to look great and be easy to navigate.

For more information, please see our Contest Rules.

Note that this isn’t a design contest, the emphasis here is on the original and creative use of AutoBlogged, but we want to see sites that we are proud to show off as AutoBlogged example sites. Since this isn’t a design contest you are free to use any WordPress theme you want. Here are some premium WordPress themes we recommend.

Example Sites

To get things started we set up a few autoblogs of our own to show what kind of stuff we are looking for.

http://mspatchwatch.com

http://advertiserguide.us

http://idolz.us

http://windows2008security.com

http://quickgardening.com

We also suggest you visit the FAQ, Knowledge Base, and Tips section of our support forum. We will be adding new tips to that regularly during our contest.

How to Enter

1. The contest ends at 12:00 am MST (GMT -0700) on April 30, 2009.
2. Read the Contest Rules.
3. To enter, please create a new post in this forum

Sponsors

We would like to give a special thank you our contest sponsors!

How to Get Technical Support

	Online Manual Read our online manual for basic usage and how-to information.
	Knowledge Base Our online knowledge base contains articles addressing many common issues.
	Support Forums Get support from and share information with other AutoBlogged users.
	E-Mail Support Personalized support by sending an e-mail to support@autoblogged.com or use this form.
	Premium Phone Support Get expert assistance and immediate help through our support partner WordPress HelpCenter

Support Announcements and News

	AutoBlogged Announcements This is where we announce all AutoBlogged-related news.
	RSS Feeds Subcribe to our articles and announcements RSS feed.
	Join our mailing list We use our mailing list only for update announcements and other important news and we never share or sell our list.
	Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter for announcements and other news.

Click on each thumbnail for a full-sized image.

Main Page

Edit Feed

Tag Options

Settings

Filtering

If you are interested in earning extra income by selling AutoBlogged, we have now launched our affiliate program.

All you need to do to get started is sign up to become an affiliate, and place our ad code onto your website. When a person clicks on the ads from your site and purchases a copy of AutoBlogged, you earn 20% of the sale. All commissions will be paid via Paypal fifteen days after the end of the month.

To help you promote AutoBlogged, we have a number of banners available. Feel free to download these or to link directly to these images on our servers.

468 x 60 Banners

125 x 125 Square Button

120 x 60 Button

120 x 90 Button

250 x 250 Square Popup

728 x 90 Leaderboard

720 x 300 Pop-Under

160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

Tags

Tags play an important role in improving the usability and findability of your web site. AutoBlogged uses tags a number of ways. First, it can pull the tags that the original author set on the feed itself. Second, it can visit the original URL to find additional tags, and finally you can also use the Yahoo! tagging API to extract additional tags.

Note that tag support in WordPress is fairly new so many older themes do not display a post’s tags. You can fix this by modifying the theme itself or finding a plugin such as Simple Tags that will do this for you.

Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are an excellent way to increase relevant keyword density on every page of your web site. WordPress has a sidebar widget to display a tag cloud for the most popular tags on your site. Also consider the Simple Tags plugin for a much more configurable sidebar widget.

When you first add feeds to AutoBlogged and run the script, you might notice that the tag cloud contains tags that are not relevant to your content. However, as time passes and your site content grows, the more relevant tags will appear more frequently and the off-topic tags will fall off the tag cloud.

Using Categories

Although you do want a large number of tags to help search engine ranking, you should be more selective with your use of categories. Use categories as a simple navigational aid on your web site and try not to create more than fifteen primary categories for your site. Every time AutoBlogged processes feeds, it goes through all blog categories to see if they appear in the feed content so a large number of categories will slow down feed processing.

Subcategories

One helpful use for categories is to use them as subcategories to group content into consistent main categories. For example, under a main category you might want to create subcategories for synonyms or alternate terminology.