For security reasons AutoBlogged strips out certain HTML tags by default. These filtered tags include those for embedding objects, forms, frames, and scripts. It would be fairly simple for someone to inject malicious content into your blog using these tags.

However, if you only pull content from trusted sources, you can configure AutoBlogged to allow certain tags. This is useful, for example, to include content such as videos embedded using the OBJECT tag.

To include these tags, you need to open autoblogged.php in a text editor and search for this code block:

define("ALLOW_OBJECT_AND_EMBED_TAGS", false);  // Allows object, embed, param
define("ALLOW_FORM_TAGS", false);  // Allows form, input
define("ALLOW_FRAME_TAGS", false); // Allows frame, iframe, frameset
define("ALLOW_SCRIPT_TAGS", false); // Allows class, expr, script, noscript...

These settings allow you to include specific sets of tags by changing the false to true. For example, if you want to include videos that use the OBJECT or EMBED tags, change the first line to this:

define("ALLOW_OBJECT_AND_EMBED_TAGS", true);  // Allows object, embed, param

After editing these settings, save the file and upload the changes to your server.

It is important to note that if you use the %excerpt% variable in your post template, these settings will have no effect. This is because the %excerpt% variable is simply a text-only excerpt of the content. If you wish to include these HTML tags, you should use other variables such as %content%, %description%, or %content:encoded%, depending on how your feed is configured.  Note also that AutoBlogged may not automatically recognize certain embedded videos, so the %video% variable may not work properly.

Right below this section there are also two other related settings:

// This turns off all HTML tag and attribute filtering.
define("ALLOW_ALL_TAGS", false);

If you set this value to true, all HTML tags will be included in each post. We certainly do not recommend this setting.

// Set the next line to true if you want HTML tags encoded rather than stripped out
define("ENCODE_INSTEAD_OF_STRIP", false);

This setting will include all HTML tags, but will encode these tags to deactivate them. Encoded HTML will display as part of the content. This is useful, for example, when the content contains unencoded code samples.

Issue

When browsing the tag options page, you see an error message like the following:

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in
/home/public_html/wp-content/plugins/AutoBlogged/ab-admin.php on line 762

This is an error introduced in a recent version of AutoBlogged and will be fixed in our next update. This error message has no impact on the operations of AutoBlogged and only shows because of an error trying to display tags that you have not set yet. You can safely ignore this message or follow one of the solutions below.

Solution

Although this error message does not affect the operation of AutoBlogged, you can make the error go away with one of the following solutions:

1. Enter a tag where it says Add new tag and click on the Add button.

2. Directly above the error message there is an X in a circle. Click on this X.

After either of these steps save your changes and you will no longer see the error message.

One of the key features of AutoBlogged is its ability to gather tags for each post, thereby increasing relevant keyword density and potentially improving your search engine rankings. There are a number of ways that AutoBlogged collects tags so we thought it would be helpful to better understand how this process works.

Feed Tags
Under the Tag Options admin panel there is an option to Use original tags from feed.

If you have this option checked, AutoBlogged will use SimplePie to extract all categories and tags from the feed item, including any tags found on any attachments. These tags are usually the most relevant because they typically are hand-selected by the author.

Adding Categories
If you edit the settings for a feed, under the Categories section there is an option If unselected blog categories appear in the post content… Add them as post tags. If this is checked, AutoBlogged will look at all the categories in your blog to see if the category text appears anywhere in the post content and will add those categories as tags on the post if they do appear.

For example, in your blog you might have a category called Microsoft Office. Under that you could have the subcategories Excel, Word, Access, and PowerPoint. Although you might have all posts from a feed go to the Microsoft Office category, you could check the Add them as post tags option to add Excel, Word, Access, or PowerPoint as tags on the post if those words appear in the post content.

This feature lets you use your site’s existing categories to improve the quality and relevance of tags on each post.

User-Assigned Tags
For each feed you can add one or more tags that AutoBlogged will randomly add to each post. Under the Tag Options admin panel you can also specify global tags that AutoBlogged will randomly add to posts from all feeds.

If you have certain keywords and phrases that you are targeting with search engines, these are the places to put them. We recommend always using the per-feed or global tags to improve search rankings and to improve the overall quality of tags. In fact, we never build an autoblog without first building a list of keywords using Google’s keyword tool.

Internal Tagging Engine
If you have the Use internal tagging engine to add tags from content option checked, AutoBlogged will visit the orignal URL of the article and try to extract relevant keywords to use as tags. This is useful because most feeds only have a short excerpt but this allows you to pull other important words from the full content. AutoBlogged does this by looking at meta keywords, titles, headings, bold words, rel tags, alt tags, link titles, and extracting phrases based on sentence structure. AutoBlogged will add weights to each of these tags and sort them accordingly.

The internal tagging engine can greatly increase relevant keywords, add long-tail phrases, and overall can improve your search rankings. Overall the tagging engine works quite well, but being an automated process it will sometimes produce sentence fragments that don’t look natural, especially when there isn’t much content in the original article. To improve the results, we have a tags.txt file that contains the most common categories and tags taken from various popular tagging sites. Tags from this file will rank higher if they appear in the article.

Note that the internal tagging engine can be very useful but it also puts more memory and processor load on AutoBlogged than any other feature. If you find that performance is an issue you should disable this feature and instead use the user-assigned tags to improve tagging. Note also that the tagging engine is highly biased towards the English language and you might not get the results you expect with other languages.

Yahoo! API
If you have this option selected and have entered a Yahoo! Application ID, AutoBlogged will then send the page content over to the Yahoo! API to extract additional tags. We have found the Yahoo! API good at identifying the content category but most often the words are too general to be worth the extra processing. In the near future we will have add-ins for other tagging engines as well.

Tag Filtering
Once AutoBlogged builds the tag list from the original content, it combines that list with the feed tags, category tags, and user-defined tags. It then goes through each tag to remove any that match the tags you have set on the Tag Filtering setting under Tag Options. AutoBlogged also loads the notags.txt file which is a series of regular expressions to remove words and phrases that are too general or that don’t work well as tags. At this point it also removes any tags that are tool long or too short based on your Maximum Tag Length and Minimum Tag Length settings.

At this point AutoBlogged probably has a big list of tags so it randomly shuffles them, which gives feed tags, category tags, user-assigned tags, and tags extracted from the content equal importance. It then trims the list based on the setting you have for Maximum Tags per Post, using a random number between that and half that value. In other words if you set a Maximum Tags Per Post setting of 12, it will trim the list to anywhere between 6 and 12 tags. Note that due to the shuffling process you could run the same article through AutoBlogged and get a different list of tags each time.

Our tagging engine is something we have spent considerable time on and we will continue to improve this feature in future versions of AutoBlogged.