You may run across a feed that gets truncated when imported into WordPress. Typically, the cutoff occurs after a non-breaking space ( ) in the feed. Sometimes this issue also shows up as an AutoBlogged post that contains the feed content but does not contain the attribution link to the original article.

Problem

In our research of this issue, we have determined that the entire post is intact when we pass it on to the WordPress API. The cutoff occurs during WordPress’ handling of the post. Although this is technically a WordPress issue, we do know that the problem is due to non-breaking spaces so we can just trim those off before we pass the post to WordPress. We will address this issue in our next AutoBlogged update.

In the meantime, however, we have identified a workaround that does fix this issue.

Solution

Until our next AutoBlogged update, you can use the following workaround to deal with this issue:

First, go into the settings for your feed and scroll to the Search and Replace section at the bottom of the page. In the Search for box, enter   and in the Replace with box type a single space as shown below:

After you set up this search and replace, you need to modify your post template, replacing all instances of %excerpt% or %content% with %description%.

For example, your new post template may look like this:

<p>%description%</p>

%if:video%<p>%video%</p>%endif:video%
%if:thumbnail%<p>%thumbnail%</p>%endif:thumbnail%

[Read more here|Read the original here|Read more from the original source]
<a target="_blank" href="%link%" title="%title%">%title%</a>

After making these changes, you should no longer have issues with truncated posts.

…

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.

For AutoBlogged to work with WordPress 2.8 or later, you must have AutoBlogged v2.5.74 or later. You can get the update with the original download link you received from us. If you no longer have this link, you can look it up here:

http://autoblogged.com/purchase/downloads/

If AutoBlogged doesn’t seem to be running automatically, you can use this article to help you troubleshoot the most common problems. AutoBlogged uses a pseudo-cron feature that depends on the theme and page visits.

1. Check the footer.php file

Not every WordPress theme properly calls the wp_footer() function. AutoBlogged needs this function to trigger the pseudo-cron feature to see if it is time to run again. To test this, try other themes or open your theme’s footer.php file in a text editor and look for the text wp_footer(). If it isn’t there, go ahead and add it if you know what you are doing or contact the theme author to add it for you.

2. Check your visitors

The AutoBlogged scheduler runs every time the page footer loads and therefore someone must visit the site every few hours for the articles to update. If you have a new site with few visitors, you may want to try signing up for a few free web site monitoring services to make sure you get enough hits to trigger the scheduler.

3. Check your plugins

Occasionally we run into plugins that conflict with AutoBlogged or themes that have functions that also conflict. To be sure there are no conflicts, try disabling all other plugins and use the default WordPress theme.

4. Check your feed

Some feeds might be causing errors that halt the feed processing, might be empty, or simply don’t have any new posts. Try running the script manually using the “Run AutoBlogged Now” link and try viewing the feed in the feed viewer.

5. Double-check your settings

Make sure that each feed is enabled and go into the Settings page and make sure that “Uncheck this if you wish to pause AutoBlogged.” is checked.

Issue

You may find that AutoBlogged is not posting the latest posts from a feed. This usually occurs when the feed is cached and is not showing the latest updates.

Solutions

• Some large sites will cache their RSS feeds, particularly if you retrieve the feed too often. Try reducing your update frequency. If that doesn’t help, there may not be much you can do.
• If you are using a complex Yahoo! Pipes feed, you may not always be receiving the latest copy due to the time it takes to process the feed. Try subscribing to that feed using various RSS readers to keep the feed freshly updated.
• Set the RSS cache timeout to zero (“0″) on the AutoBlogged Settings page

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.

Duplicate posts are an issue that seem to constantly plague autoblogging and similar autoposting WordPress plugins. There have been numerous causes for this problem in the past and we are constantly working on methods to fix this. We have had good success combating this problem, but occasionally some server configuration or WordPress update will reintroduce this bug.

Background

When AutoBlogged parses items in a feed, the first thing it does is grab the item’s title and link. Next, it will take those two values and check the database to see if those posts already exist in your WordPress blog. AutoBlogged will search the database for duplicate titles and/or links, depending on which options you have checked on the Filtering Options page.

When it searches for duplicate titles, it tries searching for the literal title as well as the sanitized form of the title using the WordPress sanitize_title and the  sanitize_title_with_dashes functions. If duplicate link checking is enabled, it will search the database for the exact link the post uses. Depending on which options you have enabled, it could do up to five checks for each post.

AutoBlogged should get one of three responses from the database: either the title and/or link already exists, an empty recordset that indicates they don’t exist, or an error message that something failed while processing the request.

The problem is that sometimes AutoBlogged gets back an empty recordset when a post exists rather than a positive result or an error message.

Causes

Most often the reason the database returns a false result is because some error or timeout occurred but the database did not return an error message. We have found this to be the case with some web server configurations. The problem is that by not returning an error, it is very difficult to debug the problem.

Another possible cause is that the character set that WordPress uses does not match that of the database therefore the duplicate checks never match any titles.

Solutions

To solve the problem with duplicates, we suggest you first make sure you have the latest AutoBlogged release. We are always improving the dupe checking code and this might be all you need to fix the problem. If that doesn’t do it, try the following solutions in order:

1. Try optimizing (or even repairing) all of your database tables using phpMyAdmin or your hosting control panel. About half the time this fixes the duplicates problem.
2. Check to make sure your database is not overloaded. If you ever see database errors on your WordPress site, this is very likely what is causing duplicate posts as well. You might also want to check the runtime configuration and system variables for possible problems using phpMyAdmin. There are links on the phpMyAdmin main page to show this information. There are a lot of settings here that affect MySQL performance and you may need an expert to help you out here if you suspect this is the problem.
3. Check the resource load on the server itself to make sure it isn’t overworked or maxing out its resources. This is fairly common with cheap shared hosting accounts.
4. If you have 10,000 or more posts in your blog or your site gets more than 3,000 visitors per day, you may simply need more powerful hardware. WordPress can be sluggish when there are too many posts or when it gets too busy and this could cause database connection failures.
5. Try configuring WordPress to use the default database character set by opening wp-config.php and removing or commenting out this line:

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

If none of these solutions work for you, perhaps the easiest solution is to find a different hosting company. We actually very rarely see the problem on any of our test servers and we have noticed that it often occurs with cheap or oversold hosting companies. We have always had good results with HostNine and A Small Orange.

If you manage your own web server, you may need to find a MySQL expert to help you optimize the database for your type of load.

As we mentioned before, this is a problem that we are constantly monitoring and always working to eliminate. If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, we are happy to help you debug it, especially if it helps us find new fixes to prevent it.

If you are a Twitter user and want to add posts to your blog for each of your tweets, AutoBlogged can help you out. Twitter provides an API that returns RSS feeds that you can enter into AutoBlogged.

There are several Twitter RSS feeds available, depending on what you want to show. These feeds are as follows:

Public Timeline

Description: Returns the 20 most recent status updates from non-protected users who have set a custom user icon.

http://­twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.rss

Friends Timeline

Description: Returns the 20 most recent status updates posted by yourself and that your friends. Note that this feed requires authentication by replacing <username> and <password> with your own username and password in the URLs below.

http://<username>:<password>@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

Optional Parameters:

• since.  Optional.  Narrows the returned results to just those status updates created after the specified HTTP-formatted date, up to 24 hours old.  The same behavior is available by setting an If-Modified-Since header in your HTTP request.  Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss?since=Tue%2C+27+Mar+2007+22%3A55%3A48+GMT
• since_id.  Optional.  Returns only statuses with an ID greater than (that is, more recent than) the specified ID.  Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss?since_id=12345
• count.  Optional.  Specifies the number of statuses to retrieve. May not be greater than 200.  Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss?count=5
• page. Optional. Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss?page=3

User Timeline

Description:  Returns your 20 most recent status updates or the updates from the user specified by the ID. Note that this feed requires authentication by replacing <username> and <password> with your own username and password in the URL below.

The RSS feed for your own posts is as follows:

http://<username>:<password>@twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss

To get the feed for another users’ post, use either their user number or user name like this:

http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/21336467.rss or http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/autoblogged.rss

Note that the username and password are not required if you are pulling the timeline of another user that is not configured as protected.

Optional Parameters:

• count.  Optional.  Specifies the number of statuses to retrieve. May not be greater than 200.  Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?count=5
• since.  Optional.  Narrows the returned results to just those statuses created after the specified HTTP-formatted date, up to 24 hours old.  The same behavior is available by setting an If-Modified-Since header in your HTTP request.  Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?since=Tue%2C+27+Mar+2007+22%3A55%3A48+GMT
• since_id.  Optional.  Returns only statuses with an ID greater than (that is, more recent than) the specified ID.  Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?since_id=12345
• page. Optional. Example: http://<username>:<password>twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?page=3

Note that you can view the full Twitter API documentation here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST-API-Documentation

Post Templates

Since a Twitter update is just a single line of text, the content in the feed is the same as the title. For that reason, you might want to leave the post template empty for Twitter feeds. However, if you do want to use a post template, here are some variables that might be useful:

%link% – This is the URL that points to the individual tweet on the web.

%source_url% – This is the URL that points to the archive you are pulling from.

%icon% – The twitter icon.

Here is an example post template that might work well for Twitter:

<p><img src=”%icon%” alt=”Twitter” /><a href=”%link%”>Twitter update</a>:  %description%</p>
<p>More here: <a href=”%source_url%”>%source_url%</a></p>

Note that beginning with AutoBlogged v2.4.23, you will be able to change the title of a post by using the Custom Fields feature. To do this, edit the feed, scroll down to the Custom Fields setting, and enter title in the Custom Field box then something like “Twitter Update” in the Custom Field Value box.

Perhaps one of the most frequent questions we get asked is if AutoBlogged can get the full post rather than just an excerpt. The answer is that autoblogged can only use what the feed provides.

By default, AutoBlogged will create a small text-only excerpt from the content in the RSS feed, will attribute the source, and link to the original article. It will also include a thumbnail of the first image found in the post if one exists. A small excerpt, a thumbnail, and attribution is largely considered fair use and we consider it a proper courtesy to those who are are actually writing or own the content you are taking. Furthermore, including full articles could lead to duplicate content penalties from search engines.

Note that the excerpt is text-only also for security purposes as people have been known to exploit autoblogs for malicious purposes.

Most RSS feeds from blogs only include an excerpt in the feed and this is the default setting for most blogging platforms such as WordPress. AutoBlogged can only work with the content that is in the feed itself, so if the feed only contains excerpts that’s all you get. You can view the contents of a feed by using our feed viewer at http://viewer.autoblogged.com/.

Occasionally some feeds do contain full content, and in that case you can access the full article by using the %content% or %content:encoded% variables in your post template (depending on how the feed is formatted).

We do recommend that you get permission to use the full feed to avoid any legal troubles and to not give autobloggers a bad name.

Excerpt Length

AutoBlogged will let you control the length of the excerpts it makes. Under the Settings admin panel there is a section for Excerpts that lets you specify a minimum and maximum number of words, sentences, or paragraphs.

Of course, this excerpt is based on the contents of the feed so it can only work with what the feed provides.

Update:  We plan to have an add-in in version 3.x that will allow for retrieving full posts.

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.