Wordpressadvice.com

Price: $59.95 (single license), $129.95 (unlimited sites)
Product: Easily automate your blog posts by configuring intelligent RSS and blog searches
Value for money: 5 out of 5

——————————————————————-

Price includes

• Full unencrypted PHP source code
• Free technical support
• Access to customer forum
• Minor version upgrades

For Digital Point users, you can get the following discounts by entering the following codes:

DPTENOFF – $10 off a single site license
DP30 – $30 off an unlimited site license

I give this product 5 out of 5 because it really is worth the money. There are still a few minor bugs they have to work out (which don’t really affect me), but they do provide regular updates and are working on the outstanding issues. When you think you pay up from $100-$300 for a premium theme, this software which comes in only just over $100 is a steal in my book.

This software allows you to put any number of RSS Feeds into categories you specify as posts, putting your Wordpress blog on autopilot if you so wish.

Autoblogged – what is it and why you should get it if you are running a blog site?

I came across Autoblogged surfing the web one day and after reading about what was possible with it I couldn’t help purchasing it. Many of my rush of the blood purchases usually end up with me regretting it a week later. But, I have found Autoblogged an indespensible part of my website. I also intend to use it on a number of other sites in the future.

How I use Autoblogged
Depending on your objectives, the way you use Autoblogged will differ. The way I use it is to have it search for relevant content which is then automatically fed into my site as a post. I then add my own comments to that feed if I have time and/or if I have something intelligent to say about the feed.This adds relevant content to my site which is good for my readers and also alerts me to other relevant content related to my website and allows me to quickly add new content on my site. I have seen a significant improvement in the number of visitors to my site since I started using this plugin.

For example, on this site I have a bunch of Wordpress related tutorials. I use Autoblogged to search for relevant topics such as ‘Wordpress Tutorials’ or ‘Premium Wordpress Themes’. Depending on the type of site you have, you would obviously change these keywords.

Below is the admin area and an example of the type of different searches you can perform. You can choose to have the feed ‘Published’, as a ‘Draft’, ‘Pending’ or ‘Private’ which is quite handy. On most of my searches I choose to have it as ‘Pending’ so I can make a decision later on whether or not to keep it.

You can choose to search from the following:
- RSS feed
- Google blog search
- Technorati search
- BloggDigger search
- Blogpulse search
- MSN Spaces search
- Yahoo! News search
- FlickR Tag Search
- YouTube! Tag search
- Yahoo! Video search

I most commonly use the RSS Feed and Google blog search. The RSS feed search is particularly useful as you can really narrow down your search.

You can select the category you want the post to be categorized under. In addition, there are a host of other options which allow you to fine tune your feed including filtering options,

It also supports images and videos. It is ideal if you want to build a content portal or news aggregation site.

Some of the main features are:

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.

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.

There is a bunch of other things to say about Autoblogged which you can find on their site.