To send us your blog configuration, go to the AutoBlogged admin page in WordPress and select the Support subpage. From there you can send in a support ticket. Below the message field are two options you can check to include your configuration: Attach system version info and Attach entire AutoBlogged configuration.

Note that if you already have an active ticket open with our support, you can reference that ticket number in the subject (i.e., ticket #2200).

…

Tags: config configuration support

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.

One thing we do here to be proactive with our technical support is we monitor search engine results for autoblogged-related errors. By watching to see what errors the search engines are indexing we can identify bugs that haven’t yet been reported. And since we are always looking for new uses for AutoBlogged, we monitor these errors with our own internal autoblog site.

To get comprehensive results, we use several tools. First, we need to get RSS feeds from various search engines, which we build using one of these tools:

http://alp-uckan.net/free/monitorthis/
http://www.researchbuzz.org/tools/kebberfegg.pl

What these tools do is let you enter in some search terms and it will generate the RSS feed URLs for various search engines in OPML format. Although AutoBlogged doesn’t as of yet allow importing OPML, we copy and paste each feed URL one at a time.

Another way to gather search results is to use a Yahoo! Pipes meta search such as this one here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=nHNB8TJm3BGumlGA9YS63A

Our internal support autoblog doesn’t just watch for errors, we also watch to see who is asking questions about our script, who is illegally sharing our script, who is writing about our script, and of course, who is praising it. Each group of feeds goes into its own category and it is all nicely organized, automatically tagged, and presented in a great-looking WordPress blog.

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.

For the latest information of WordPress compatibility, see http://www.autoblogged.com/support/release-history/

For information on any known issues with the latest WordPress releases, see http://autoblogged.com/support/kb/known-issues/

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
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

One of the things that makes AutoBlogged stand out from other autoblog tools is the powerful Post Templates feature. The Post Template determines how AutoBlogged formats the post it imports into WordPress. Although most users leave the Post Templates at the default settings, many of you have experimented with minor changes to the Post Template to customize your autoblog.

Post Templates support a number of advanced functions that let you customize how AutoBlogged handles a post. There are a number of variables that let you decide what feed items you want to appear in the post. In addition to the basic feed items, AutoBlogged also allows you to access custom namespace elements in an RSS or Atom feed.

Custom namespaces allow feed publishers to add additional feed elements that do not exist in the basic RSS or Atom specifications. Many sites have created custom namespaces to add additional information about the items in their feeds. For example, YouTube adds a namespace that allows them to include additional data such as the user ratings of a video. In a YouTube feed, they first define the namespace at the top of the feed like this:

<feed xmlns:gd=’http://schemas.google.com/g/2005′ >

Then, they refer to the namespace within the feed like this:

<gd:rating average=’4.9114695′ max=’5′ min=’1′ numRaters=’17734′ rel=’http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#overall’/>

We don’t want to go too much into the implementation details in this article, just introduce what custom namespaces are. If you want to learn more about namespaces go here or here.

It is important to note that many publishers simply add new XML elements to an RSS feed without actually declaring namespaces. This is not valid and AutoBlogged will not be able to parse them. If you run into a feed like this, we suggest pointing the publisher to the two links mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Accessing Namespaces

If you have a feed with custom namespaces, you can use them in your post template using the format %namespace:element@attribute% where namespace is the namespace URL or abbreviation, element is the element name, and attribute is an optional attribute of the element. In the YouTube rating example shown earlier, gd is the namespace, rating is the element, and average, max, min, numRaters, and rel are the attributes. Using that example, if you want to show the average rating in your Post Template, use the variable %gd:rating@average%.

If you are feeling a bit confused, below are a number of examples that may better illustrate how to use custom namespaces.

Examples

For our first example, we will take a simplified excerpt from a Yahoo Videofeed:

<item>
<title>Using Custom Namespaces</title>
<description>Using custom namespaces in AutoBlogged Post Templates.</description>
<link>http://video.yahoo.com/watch/……</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 28 Jan 2007 03:00:00 -0800</pubDate>
<media:keywords>autoblogged, autoblog, wordpress</media:keywords>
<media:thumbnail url=”http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/sch/cn/v/v0/…..jpg />
<media:content type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” medium=”video” lang=”">
<media:player url=”http://d.yimg.com/ht/…” height=”512″ width=”322″ />
</media:content>
</item>

In the above feed, to show the keywords for the video, use the variable %media:keywords%. To include the thumbnail, use %media:thumbnail@url%

Now consider an example from a YouTube feed:

<media:group>
<media:category label=’Music’ scheme=’http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007/categories.cat’>Music</media:category>
<media:content url=’http://www.youtube.com/……’ type=’application/x-shockwave-flash’ medium=’video’ isDefault=’true’ expression=’full’ duration=’334′ yt:format=’5′/>
<media:description type=’plain’>Using custom namespaces in AutoBlogged Post Templates.</media:keywords>
<media:player url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=……’/>
<media:thumbnail url=’http://i.ytimg.com/vi/……/2.jpg’ height=’90′ width=’120′ time=’00:02:47′/>
<media:thumbnail url=’http://i.ytimg.com/vi/……/1.jpg’ height=’90′ width=’120′ time=’00:01:23.500′/>
<media:title type=’plain’>Using AutoBlogged</media:title>
<yt:duration seconds=’334′/>
</media:group>
<gd:rating average=’4.9114695′ max=’5′ min=’1′ numRaters=’17734′ rel=’http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#overall’/>
<yt:statistics favoriteCount=’34363′ viewCount=’4928462′/>

This feed is a bit different because it uses nested elements. In other words, media:content is nested inside the media:group element. Due to a limitation in SimplePie, which we use to process RSS feeds, you must refer to these variables using the full hierarchy with a slash (“/”) between elements. So if you wish to show the media description you would use the variable %media:group/media:description%. If you want to show the duration of the video, you would use the variable %media:group/media:content@duration%.

Note that AutoBlogged currently does not support custom namespaces for attributes, so you would not be able to access the yt:format attribute in the media:content element above. Note also that when there are multiple custom fields with the same name, AutoBlogged will only return the first element it finds.

In addition to custom namespaces, you can specifically refer to certain RSS or Atom elements in a feed using the RSS and Atom namespaces. Consider the following RSS feed excerpt:

<item>
<title>Using Post Templates</title>
<link>http://www.autoblogged.com…….</link>
<guid>http://www.autoblogged.com…….</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:18:51 -0700</pubDate>
</item>

In this feed, you can refer to the guid as %rss:guid% and the pubDate as %rss:pubDate%. With an atom feed you can do the same:

<entry>
<id>http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/……</id>
<published>2005-12-28T03:15:32.000Z</published>
<updated>2009-05-26T12:55:23.000Z</updated>
</entry>

With this feed you can refer to the published date as %atom:published%.

Uncommon Namespaces

Note that in order for AutoBlogged to use a custom namespace abbreviation, it needs to be defined in the modules.php file. If you open the file, you can see that we have already defined most common namespace modules. If you want to use a custom namespace that isn’t listed in that file, you have two options:

1. Edit modules.php to include your custom namespace, following the same format as the other definitions.

2. Always use the full namespace URL when referring to the namespace in your Post Template.

For example, consider this feed excerpt:

<rss version=”2.0″ xmlns:product=”http://www.example.com/schemas/product”>
<channel>
<title>Products Feed</title>
<item>
<title>New Product Announcement</title>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:18:51 -0700</pubDate>
<product:type>Tools</product:type>
<product:price>9.99</product:price>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

In this example, if you want to use product:type in your Post Template, you can either add the line “product” => “http://www.example.com/schemas/product”, at the end of the list in modules.php and use %product:type% in your Post Template or you can simply use %http://www.example.com/schemas/product:type% in your Post Template without having to modify modules.php.

As you can see, referring to custom namespace elements is a bit of an advanced feature and it does require you to view the raw XML of your feed to find most variable names. However, it is a very powerful feature that can really make your blog stand out from the rest.