Autoblogged WordPress Plugin | Create Posts from RSS Feeds

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Put your WordPress site on autopilot!

Create posts for your website automatically, simply though the magic of RSS feeds.

Ok.This technology is not new, and at first glance I thought this looked very similar to the free WP-o-matic plugin. I have played around with the WP-o-matic plugin, but I did not like the lack of control over content and the lack of support by the developer, therefore I never used it in any production site. It’s really too bad though, because it looked like a promising plugin.

Autoblogged to the rescue.

The issues I had with WP-o-matic, are addressed with this software. There is a support forum and there are plenty of tools to control the content that is generated using this plugin.

Here is the feature set as described by the author of the 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 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, Google 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 often 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

Post Filtering

• Domain blacklist to block 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.
• Keyword blacklists to exclude posts that contain certain keywords.
• 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.

Categories and Tags

• Assign each feed to a specific blog category or subcategory.
• When other blog categories are found in the post, they can be added as additional categories or tags.
• Visits the original URL to extract additional tags using the internal tagging engine.
• Add extra tags using the Yahoo! tagging API.
• 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.
• 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.

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 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 player
• 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.
• Automatic image, logo, and favicon detection.

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.

Other Features

• Uses the built-in WordPress cron feature so cron access is not required.
• Executes at random time intervals to create a natural appearance.
• Disable cron operations without disabling the entire plugin.
• 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.
• Full PHP source code included.
• Support forum and e-mail support for all registered users.
• Free minor version updates included.

I must say this list is pretty impressive. There is one caveat however. You must be using WordPress 2.5+ to use this plugin.

I am going to be purchasing the multisite version of this software, as I have some ideas brewing for this site and some additional sites I run. I’ll keep you all posted with my progress so you can see this thing in action.

Also, if you are using this software, please post your website so we can all take a look how you are using it.

Update.

I purchased the Developer’s License of this software and it works great! I am very happy with my purchase.

I did have an issue initially with getting the YouTube feeds to work, but the helpful support rep informed me that YouTube had just made a change to their API, and had an update emailed to me the following day. Now that’s what I call support!

The software is easy to use and is also very powerful. Here is a sample series of posts I created using the built-in YouTube Query:

See My Sample Series of WordPress Tutorials created automatically using Autoblogged. (this link has been removed)

Things to note:

• I did not manually create these posts – they were created for me using Autoblogged
• I simply typed the words “Wordpress Tutorial” into the keywords textbox and it generated this list of links
• You can set your automated feeds to Publish, Draft, or Pending Status.
• This link may only be functional for a limited time as it is set up now as a sample to demonstrate the effectiveness of this plugin

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