This lesson is a part of a series of articles I am writing (and updating) that teaches newcomers the basics in Web development. I’ll also write more advanced tutorials for those already in the industry, but need specific help such as extending with plugins and hacks. Moving forward, I plan to develop courseware covering a wide variety of subjects such as PHP and ColdFusion, CMS, Social site development, Web 2.0 standards and more. -GeekyBitch

I wrote this article for our DNA network members about a feature we just released called Autoblogging. We are using the plugin AutoBlogged as a method for generating content from feeds on the Web. I did a little write-up on the feauture to help our clients use the plugin with Wordpress.

This particular write-up is geared toward using the Arthemia Premium theme with Wordpress. Thought I would share it here so that it might help someone else.

AutoBlogged Guide

AutoBlogged is a plugin that allows you to pull content from RSS feeds into your posts. There are several things that you should consider before setting up and sort of automatic feed into your blog.

Research RSS Feeds

Autoblogged comes with a search feature that allows you to use keywords to find RSS feeds rather than an actual URL. While you can assume content from sites like Yahoo News is safe – you should still do your homework.

It’s advised that you consider actually doing a Google search on a particular subject. For instance, google “Business Rss Feeds” and read through the results. One result returned this website that lists the Top 100 Most Subscribed to Rss Feeds:

http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/rssHotlist

To see how the feed looks, click the XML icon next to each listing. Most sites will offer a RSS icon or link to their feed so that you can view its results.

What you see is what you get:

• Some feeds offer images with text.
• Some feeds just offer text.
• Some include ads, such as google ads.

Copyright

Copyright is a hard thing to pin down when it comes to publishing on the Web and with RSS feeds. The absolute best thing you can do to avoid any sort of issues is to get permission.

Sure, it’s a lot easier just to snag the RSS feed URL and provide the source/author – however, sometimes that still isn’t enough. There are other considerations, too. Some sites publish images that they have purchased rights to. If you grab that image and display it on your site, regardless if you have permission to run their RSS feed, you can find yourself in trouble with the owner of that image.

(We will get into other image options later.)

Nonetheless, taking the time to research a quality feed and asking permission to run Excerpts/Content from it on your site – will prevent a lot of issues in the future.

Don’t Just Auto-pilot Your site

Autoblogging is great because it provides you with relevant content without having to write every single article. However, it’s advised that you use Autoblogging as an enhancement rather than your only method of publishing to your site.

Suggested Use

• Research and pick two or three subject areas to post, such as Business, Politics and Technology.

• Make sure that you’re allowed to repost the content on your blog. Most sites do not have a problem with this as long as you’re not posting the full article and you provide credit with a link back to the article.

• Manually pull content everyday. Simply schedule a day of the week, where you will spend a little time processing new content from feeds. What that means is when you setup the RSS feed, configure the feed to pull only the 5 latest posts and set it to manual feed – meaning you process the feed when you want fresh content. This way you can still benefit from pulling fresh content, but you’re in complete control over what exactly posts.  * This is the best option so that you can control how the posts look on your home page.

• Provide your own stock images. Take the time to find a stock photo site and pick 20-30 generic images for a specific category. You can set it up so that each post pulls a random photo from your stock images to display as your thumbnails on the home page as well as the post image. This saves you from reposting copyrighted images and gives you control over the quality of image that shows on your site.

While these measures might seem a bit time consuming at first to establish, once you do, your effort will pay off in the long run.

Feed Options

There are a few options you will need to setup before processing feeds.

Tag Options (AutoBlogged>Tag Options)

Here you can set the length of tags, how many tags per post, whether or not you want the original tags from the feeds to display or create your own for each category.

Settings (AutoBlogged>Settings)

The main setting you’ll want to adjust here is the Excerpt. You can control how many words, sentences and paragraphs you pull from feeds. It’s suggested that you pull 50-55 words because of the home page layout.

IMPORTANT

You can pull the full content from a feed to the actual post. The excerpt is for home page purposes and will limit the text on the home page to the amount you specify in Excerpt Settings.

Keep in mind that if you pull a large amount of feed content for your posts – the Premium Theme’s First Post will display all of that content.  The other Latest Posts on the home page will display the 50-55 word excerpt.

This is why manually pulling the feeds is suggested. This way you can modify the Last post on the home page with the <!–more–> tag (refer to the Arthemia Premium Guide) to show as much content as you want. Also, you do not have to concern yourself with new posts being processed in without your review when manually processing feeds.

Example Feed

Setting up and processing a feed is straight forward.

1. Navigate to AutoBlogged>Feeds.
2. Create a new feed.

General Settings

In General Settings you specific the type of feed you want, the URL of the feed or keywords. In our example, I am using a RSS feed: Yahoo Technology.

Feed Processing

You can specify when to update the feed and how many posts to pull in. For our example, we are going to manually process our feed and we only want to pull in 5 posts at a time.

Categories

3. Choose which categories you want the feed to post to.

Authors

Specify the Authors that you want to include in the post. You should always use the Author of the post and skip any posts that do not have an author.

Images

This is an important setting. You will want to check Save local copies of all images in the feed. Especially if you are pulling in full content. If you check the Create local thumbnails for each image and pull in full content, it will display the original image and a thumbnail version in the post.

However, you have no control over the size of the image when you Save local copies of all images in the feed. Again, this is why manually pulling in fresh content benefits you. This way you can resize any images that are too large and include and image if a post does not have one.

Post Templates

The default content pull is set to excerpt. This will pull a portion of the post instead of the full content. If you want to pull an all of the content, change <p>%excerpt%</p> to <p>%content%</p>

4. Save Changes to the feed when you are finished.

Processing

1. To manually process the feed, click the Process Now button Feeds screen.

A summary of the feed content will display. It’s clear that some feeds do NOT have images while some do.

How the feed displays on the home page:

As you can see, pulling in only 5 posts manually enables you to quickly provide photos for the posts that do not have images.

Compensating by Adding Default Random Images

The original help article is found in the Support Forums at Autoblogged here: http://support.autoblogged.com/forums/6307/entries/28553

We’ve modified the article for our purpose.

The design of the Premium theme relies heavily on images on the home page, as well as thumbnails for each article. Most articles that are used from an RSS feed do not have images.

To fix this, we went to sites like istockphoto.com and www.sxc.hu to download both free and purchased stock photos that seemed relevant to the theme, yet generic enough to use with any article. We gathered 50 good photos, resized them all to the same size, and then renamed them 1.jpg through 50.jpg and uploaded them to our site.

Next, for each feed that doesn’t produce good images we added a custom field in AutoBlogged called Image. Note that the Arthemia Premium theme specifically looks for images in this custom field. We set the value of the field as follows:

/wp-content/uploads/business/ [1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14].jpg

NOTE: This setting is in the AugoBlogged>Feeds> Feeds Settings screen. (Where you edit or when you create a new feed.)

Below is a screen shot of our example setting – we are only using 5 default images:

You can use post template syntax in your custom field values and bracketed values separated by pipes indicates to AutoBlogged to pick a random value from the list. In other words, AutoBlogged will randomly pick a number between 1 and 50 to create Image field values.

With just 50 images we do sometimes get two or more articles with the same picture on the front page but for the most part that isn’t that big of a deal and it greatly improves the look and professionalism of the site.

Test the Random Photos

Upload 5 random photos after naming them then 1 through 5. (at /wp-content/uploads/business/[1|2|3|4|5].jpg)

1. Navigate to AutoBlogged>Feeds and either create a new feed or edit an existing feed.

2. Add the following to the Custom Fields panel.

3. Save and process the feed.

The default images display:

Getting More Help

There are far too many scenarios to cover in this guide. Read over the AutoBlogged documentation to take advantage of all the features and methods of publishing feeds.

AutoBlogged Online Help: http://autoblogged.com/online-help