How To Replicate Techchuck AutoBlog

[specopkirbs]

STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO (ALMOST) REPLICATE TECHCHUCK.COM​

Okay guys im going to have to break this down into steps as im pretty busy but i will do as much as i can at once.
First of all if you havent seen it yet check out http://techchuck.com its probably one of the best looking and functioning autoblogs out there. Now im not going to teach you exactly how to replicate the blog as truth be known i dont think i could do that...just yet. Ive made a basic replica at http://technicnews.comnow i know mine is by no means perfect but i am improving it each day and as i learn more about techchuck i will update this post.
I am going to asume you know the basics and have hosting i would recommend if you are a complete beginner with wordpress that you get some practice first.
okay lets get down to buisness

STEP 1​

Theme - the theme used in techchuck.com is the elegant box theme download this http://www.neoease.com/themes/
Now like i said im going to assume your savvy with wordpress and can install a theme.
Plugins- here is a list of the plugins used you can find these on google or on wordpress or even on here...im not going to wipe your arse for you do some searching... i would give the links but i honestly dont have time to dig them all out right now.I will leave out the ones not relating to the layout of theme eg platinum seo etc

1. WP-O-MATIC / Simple Pie / Simple Pie Core...these all work together
2. Wordpress Related Posts
3. Thumbnails for Excerpts
4. Simple Tags
5. Next Gen Gallery
6. Duplicate Post Eraser (can be found on here)
7. Different Posts Per Page
8. All in One Adsense
9. OnlyWire Multi Auto Submiter (developed by a member of BHW)
10. Max Banner Ads...only if you want a banner at the top of the theme

Sorry Guys thats all for now ill update this later on with step 2 but like i said im a little busy today

 

[jaivy]

waitting for step 2

 

[letusgo]

waitting for step 2

me too

 

[specopkirbs]

im working on it now guys

 

[specopkirbs]

STEP 2

Ok guys step 2 now​

- Go into the theme options and select the colour you wish to use and deselect "allow visitors to change the theme".

- Go into the them editor and select main index template.php find the part in the script that says "the_content" and change it to read "the_excerpt". and save.

do a test post and make sure visit your site and ensure you are seeing an excerpt and not the full post.

- now your rss feeds for wp-o-matic again i will asume you have worked out how to set this up for a cron job if not search google im not going to do it all for you i havent got the time. If you are making a tech news blog you can go into the techcchuck site and look at the feeds he has used...alot of the feeds on there have subcategories so you can customise it so it gets different feeds to what he has. You will need to create a seperate category in your blog for each feed this will become apparent later.

- set wp-o-matic to pull 1 item for each feed and space them accordingly ie every 3 hours every 4 hours etc i set mine for every 3 hours and started each feed an hour apart so i have my content updated every hour around the clock.

-try pulling 1 or two feeds by using the fetch now feature in wp-o-matic

-you should now see on your home page the posts you have pulled...in excerpt format ie the first 50 or so words of your blog...also if you have the thumbnails for excerpts plugin activated you should also see a small thumbnail image (only if there is an image in the post itself).

- one thing i have noticed about the thumbs for excerpt plugin is it seems to remove the continue reading link to your post in the excerpt.... i have hunted high and low to find a resolution for this but cant find it...the image still links to the post as does the title. i have someone looking at this for me now.

-ok so you have your blog pulling content and looking reasonably simlar to the techchuck blog. the sidebar will be different though you can customise that how you like...i will show you how to put the gallery on the sidebar later.

- Simple tags. Now go into the options and ensure the related posts option is not on we will be using a different plugin for this which works well with the youtube API

-go into the posts section of wp and you should see an option for auto tags...go into that and activate auto tags, also fill up your keywords box with keywords relating to your site.i have noticed that sometimes the plugin doesnt auto tag to remedy this just log in ocassionally and hit the auto tags all content button.

okay thats it for now guys gotta run ill be back later so look forward to step 3

 

[specopkirbs]

STEP 3​

Related Posts- this section will be a little more complicated as we include the related videos here ie...the Youtube API.

- first go to your related posts settings in wordpress and change the title to related posts and videos or something simlar

-when there is no related posts leave it to say no related posts or you may have trouble with youtube api

-no related posts titles or texts leave this option blank and set the limit to 3 do not exclude category and do not check any of the boxes below that.and save your preferances.

-ok here it is guys the youtube API ok first go to the youtube api widget page http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/wizards/videobar.html

-ok leave the bar as horizontal and uncheck all the boxes...now remove the channel that is already in there and replace it with channels of your own selection...to choose channels open another window and go into youtube and search for channels relating for your niche. once you have a few place them into the youtube api each one seperated by a comma okay because we are using channels ignore the keywords option underneath.

-click show code you should now see a box with the code in highlight the entire box and copy the whole script.

-go back to your wordpress and go to the theme editor and go to single post (single.php)

-okay search that page for the words "related posts" there should be 2 or 3 there under the last one find the next bit of code that reads <?php endif; ?>

-paste your yourtube api script directly under the <?php endif; ?> and save.

go to your site and with each post you should now have related posts and videos and you should now see your youtube videos. nb you may not see any related posts if you only have one or 2 articles in there at this time.

right guys ill leave it there again for now and ill be back to do the last one soon which will be mainly concentrating on the next gen gallery sidebar widget and how to link it to your article images.

 

[pdoods]

Wow.. good job specopkirbs! :biggthump

 

[specopkirbs]

thanks it is still a work in progress ill update this thread everytime i work out some thing new...im almost there with the icons in the titles for the site the feeds come from and the related twitter shouldnt be a problem either.going away on a course for 4 days tomorrow then ill crack the rest...im looking at putting a sidebar under the posts so it looks more like techchuck it will enable using widgets under the posts so you should be able to further customise the site how you like... but that will be later in the week.

 

[infomycin]

Looking really good... keep it coming.

 

[Super Hero]

Nice Work!
mashget.com is looking nicer than techchuck.com

 

[dheaven]

BUT AFTER ALL WHO IS CHUCK???

i left him a message in his comments on his blog that he deleted. i asked him there a few question that he replay by email and here it goes!

Hi dheaven,

Well, for the photos widget, basially it's a subsystem wrote by
myself. As you see, it's autoblogging(also I don't think it's a blog),
I use wp-o-matic at first to handle the rss feeds, and I found some
feeds with a thumbnail photo as a media info, that gave me an idea to
write some codes to read out the photos. Till now, actually a lot of
funcs have been added to meet my own needs. The site is still a
wordpress system, but be changed a lot.

For the twitter/youtube related, that's just use the twitter/youtube
search api, and output the results with some template.

I know my answer didn't tell you more, some of my works that could be
made pubilc, like the widget cache plugin itself, but some others are
involved in too many things, and might also be some kind of business
secret, right?

Regards,
Andrew

And this is the email i sent him back!

Hello, thx for the replay, i know you're a busy guy so i really apreciate.

I found a plugin that does the related posts with pics, some guys suggested
that you are feeding youtube/twitter from the streams, so they were right. I
worked with YACG a long time ago and it was doing the same thing, probably
it does exactly the same till this day. It's a good way to get some content
but not sure it's very acurate when dealing with long keywords but your blog
is pretty custom made and seems like your good with coding so i guess you
don't have much problems and always if needit can code your way around.

Unfortuntly i lack the skills in doing so but hopefuly there are some
good things out there on the open market.

You can feed your articles with pics automaticly, maybe won't be 100%
acurate and i see that you are going pretty much for that but depends on
what are you scraping...an easy script to insert a pic into the beginning of
the article shouldn't present itself to be difficult. So you woudn't depend
that much on already built in pics. Depends on how you built your
system..starting from keyword...or starting from what you pull directly
without filtring from your sources...or maybe some other strategy you are
using

Can you give me some good advices on how to build autoblogs? i've just
started so even if i have an idea i am still fighting to come up with a good
strategy.

And this is his answer again

Actually before I read your email, I never realized my site is some
kind of autoblogging. I'm reading news, and if I found something
interesting, I'll google something else to digg more, that's why I
began to built mashget.com. Wordpress doesn't mean a blog to me, it's
just a open-source cms, and as lots of plugins there, that might save
my work at first.

I knew a lot of people thought it should be great to built some
autoblogging site, might be a lot of sites at the same time, but
actually that's not my story. Google is smart, right, but it also
means many engineers works very hard every day, skills might save
time, but most of the time, it just save the user's time, not
yourselfs, the real bloggers have to write some articles, I've to
handle tech issues, as wp itself might not designed for very large
systems.

A website is supposed to provide something, that's the point. If you
get some tech skills, just make some things easier, but autoblogging
itself, is not a goal.

Regards,
Andrew

​

DO YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS FOR HIM?
(I'M NOT SURE IF HE WILL REPLAY AGAIN)
​

 

[specopkirbs]

That guy really knows his shit when it comes to coding...anyway...

STEP 4​

Next gen gallery.

- to have the gallery in the sidebar with relevant images we need to pull the images from the same folder that wp-o-matic is saving them too your wp-o-matic cache

-you should have set up a cache when you installed wp-o-matic and set it up.
in my case its in the folder plugins/wp-o-matic/cache it maybe different on yours depending where you have set it in wp-o-matic.

-First in next gen gallery go to add gallery/images now in the tabs go to import image forlder and set this to your cache folder and continue through the instructions to gather the images from your posts.

-im not 100% this is fully automated im pretty sure you may have to do this maybe once a day or once you have lots of images in the cache maybe once a week! ive yet to find a work around for this but ill keep you guys posted...in my opinion its not that important anyway as its just there to make the theme look good and break up the sidebar a bit.

okay thats as far as i will go for now guys ive been working on the icons for the post titles and had it working today... i will post it here when im 100% it works everytime... i dont want to post it now as it involves messing with the coding and i dont want to give you duff information and have you guys messing up your theme templates etc... on that note i will go into great detail when i do post that info here.
unfortunatly im away on a course for 4 days after tomorrow so you may have to wait a bit before i post the next steps...but as it goes you should have enough to get your blog looking good and reasonably simlar to techchuck and technicnews.
Hope this has helped you a bit and sorry ive not been so detailed with this short tutorial im just busy as hell at the minute. if you do need help with anyof it drop me a pm and ill do my best to answer your questions.
cheers guys
kirbs

 

[specopkirbs]

ah forgot to mention on next gen to add the gallery to the sidebar just go to appearance> widgets and add the next gen gallery widget and choose your gallery. ill try and knock together a more detailed tutorial when im back off my course as i should have loads of free time. and dont forget if you have any questions for the author of techchuck then let dheaven know before sends him another message!

 

[specopkirbs]

okay guys im off on my course now if anyone needs any help pm me and ill answer them all when i get back...im also going to work on some other themes to when im back so we dont all have identical blogs lol

 

[sodacrates]

excellent guide Specopkirbs, this will make my autoblogs look a bit more like "real" websites now. Thank you v much.

 

[spikyy]

I appreciate your work. Thanks

 

[luckian121]

Thanks...

 

[r4nd0m1]

One quick question.. How do you guys remove links and such from post from wp-o-matic? Some times, even book marking scripts are copied :/

 

[dheaven]

dheaven mind asking him how much revenue he is generating from that blog alone? I would estimate that its a nice source of income to him.

ok, i will, i was just hoping more questions will add up. I'll email him tomorrow and hopefully he'll answer the next day

 

[blackhaty]

dheaven,
I have few questions.

1. Can you find out whether Image for each post is stored in different column in post table or its stored in same post_content column.
2. can you ask him to share wp-o-matic if possible.