If you don’t want to read the entire documentation, below is a quick guide for setting up a simple topic portal blog. Before getting started, make sure you have the latest version of WordPress installed and working properly. You may find their Getting Started Guide helpful.

If you plan on using other plugins, you might first want to wait until you get AutoBlogged working properly to ensure there are no conflicts.

Configuring WordPress

There are a few basic things you need to do to get a minimal blog up and running. You will want to select a theme and fine-tune the settings for your blog. For this demonstration, however, we will just need to edit the default category.

From the admin area of your blog (usually located at http://yoursite.com/wp-admin), click on Manage, then on Categories. Now click on the default category and rename it to something that relates to your topic. Also create any extra categories you might want for you blog.

Installing AutoBlogged

To install the AutoBlogged plugin, extract the contents of the download file and upload the entire autoblogged directory to the /wp-content/plugins directory on your web host.

Note that AutoBlogged will attempt to set permissions on the /cache directory to 666. If that setting does not work, you may have to use chmod 777, which may pose a security risk. If you have trouble with this step, please contact your web hosting provider.

From the WordPress admin area, click on the Plugins menu, find AutoBlogged on the list and click on the link to enable the plugin.

Configuring AutoBlogged

1. Click on the Settings menu and then click on the AutoBlogged submenu
2. Click on the Add new feed link.
3. From the Feed Type list, select Google Blog Search.
4. In the Search Keywords box, enter the search terms you want for your subject.
5. Scroll down to the Categories and Tags section and select a default category for all posts from this feed.
6. Scroll down and click on Save Changes.
7. On the upper-left portion of the page, click on the Run Script Now link to test your settings and perform the first script run.

If the script runs correctly, you are finished. The script will automatically check for new posts every 1-3 hours.

What To Do Next

• Add more feeds
• Identify common search terms and long-tail phrases using tools such as Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Add these in the Additional Tags option on the Tag Options screen.
• Review existing posts to see the tags collected and if you see any you don’t want, delete them and add them to the Tag Filtering box on the Tag Options screen.

…

Category: AutoBlogged Plugin

Tags: automatic posting blog posts build wordpress blog rss autoblog

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…

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

AutoBlogged at this time only works with a WordPress installation that you control. Note that it will not work on free WordPress hosts such as wordpress.com where you cannot install custom plugins.

We are considering versions of AutoBlogged that work with other platforms, so if you have a specific request, please comment below.

WordPress has a reputation of breaking compatibility with third party plugins and themes with each new version release. Although we try to fully test each new WordPress release, sometimes new releases have short beta periods or are even announced with no public beta testing.

To minimize the impact of compatibility issues with WordPress upgrades, we recommend the following:

• Create a test site to try out new releases before deploying them to your production site.
• Create full backups (all files and your database) before performing any upgrades.
• Check our Known Issues page before upgrading.

More Information

• Upgrading WordPress
• Upgrading WordPress Extended
• Common WordPress Installation Problems
• WordPress Release Archive

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/

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 getting errors that memory has been exhausted, that means that PHP is not allocating enough memory for WordPress and all its plugins to run. You can fix this by allocating more memory to PHP or to reduce the amount of memory you are using.

To allocate memory to PHP you can do one of these, depending on what kind of access you have on your server:

• Increase the memory_limit setting in the php.ini file to 48M, 64M, 96M, or higher if necessary.
• If you don’t have access to the php.ini file edit the .htaccess file in the web root directory and add (or change) the line php_value memory_limit 48M (or 48M, 64M, 96M, or higher if necessary).
• Since some hosts do not let you modify memory limits from the .htaccess file, edit the wp-settings.php file and find the line that contains define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘32M’); and change the 32M to 48M, 64M, 96M, or higher if necessary.
• If this still doesn’t work you may need to contact your hosting company to see if they will increase the memory limit. If not, you may need to upgrade to a higher hosting plan or find a different hosting company.

Another alternative is to reduce the memory usage by using fewer feeds, using simpler feeds, and disabling other plugins that you might not need. Note that there are unresolved bugs in both SimplePie and PHP that might lead to memory leaks so sometimes the only solution is to use fewer feeds.