How To Replicate Techchuck AutoBlog

[specopkirbs]

ive got my cron running every hour and my wom every hour also but its down to personal preferance and your hosting you dont want to piss of your host...the reason they are showing simlar times is because it only starts the countdown once the cron has run you could try varying the times for each feed thats one option

 

[mark9510]

Im confused about the the frequency and the cron job.
What is the difference in frequency and cron job. Dont they both just pull the feed?

 

[specopkirbs]

no the frequency you set in wom is still governed by the cron job...if you set wom to pull every hour for example but the cron is only set to every 3 hours then it will only pull feeds every 3 hours when it runs the cron

 

[omoxx]

Can anybody explain how do I put Youtube bar near the footer part, and not in the sidebar widget, please?
Thanxxx

 

[mark9510]

but mine is set for the frequency to be every 10 minutes yet the upcoming campaigns are around 30minutes to an hour apart

 

[specopkirbs]

onoxx are you using a plugin for it? if so you dont need to just use the widget from the youtube api
not entirely sure what you mean mark9510 i take it you mean the cron is set for every 10 mins? ill chat to ya on msn about it tomorrow off to bed now

 

[cnpabi]

Hey Guys I found this plugin - get the image - It does everything we need to post the thumbnail pic , well almost.
1. Check for images by custom field key.
2. If no image, grab an attachment image.
3. If no attachments, scan the post content for an image (new feature).
4. If no images at this point, the script can be set to a default.
Its written with functions and arrays if anyone knows this stuff maybe you can change the last check for default call and call it to choose a random pic from a folder ie. w-o-m cache.

link: justintadlock.com/archives/2008/12/21/get-the-image-plugin-update-a-better-image-script-for-wordpress

I didn't contact the creator because he charges 25.00 to join his support forum.

dude,can this plugin resize the pics? caz some pics are 50k or larger, this is really complicate for me.If it can let the pic to 2-3k, that's perfect.Thanks.

 

[zesty]

how much do you expect you could make off this just one single blog?

 

[zesty]

mine looks pretty solid so far I think, I've been making unique tweaks along the way.

Few things

1. is there a way to change the amount of text that's displayed in the_excerpt()? Currently it's only a few sentences, I'd like to make it a little longer.

2. have we figured out his image gallery yet which goes to unique related posts, and not just an image gallery

3. whats a good plugin that auto scrapes tags? the current plugin listed makes you put in keywords, and I want this to be fully automated I want one that scans the post for likely words.. i had one at one point i cant rmemeber it though

4. how did he set up the "related topics" area within a post which only shows like 5 or 6 tags or keywords that then go to a page just showing posts with that keyword

Thanks guys, I love this thread

 

[donjuan]

For that youtube video bar insert this code between the " " ex: executeList : ["Insert code here"]

This will display related videos for the first tag on your post.

<?php $posttags = get_the_tags(); 
$count=0; if ($posttags) 
{ foreach($posttags as $tag) 
{ $count++; if (1 == $count) 
{ echo $tag->name . ' '; } } } ?>

You can also download their css and js scripts and modify the bar/player abit.
Ex. using that player with some modifications http://tech.ccortez.com/?p=577

If someone can help with the modification of the video bar to space them out a bit and possibly include more videos.
Would be appreciated

 

[Fudnut]

1. is there a way to change the amount of text that's displayed.....
2. have we figured out his image gallery....
3. whats a good plugin that auto scrapes tags? ....

Look for the function 'wp_trim_excerpt()' in wp-includes/formatting.php and change the number of words. The default is 55.
This is mine, I also added in a permalink instead of the default '[...]'
.

function wp_trim_excerpt($text) {
	if ( '' == $text ) {
		$text = get_the_content('');

		$text = strip_shortcodes( $text );

		$text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
		$text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
		$text = strip_tags($text);
		$excerpt_length = apply_filters('excerpt_length', 60);
		$words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
		if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
			array_pop($words);
			array_push($words, '<a '.'href="'.get_permalink().'">'.'Read More...'.'</a>');
			$text = implode(' ', $words);
		}
	}
	return $text;
}

As for his image gallery, he's using some fancy js that was obfuscated. The decoded file was posted earlier by someone else as a zip.

It also contains the functions for his Youtube display & functions for some of his other customizations. Hence the reason he 'packed' the functions to try and stop others checking it out.

But even with it decoded you'd need to know your stuff to reverse engineer it I would think.

WP-auto-tagger is OK, though a little 'greedy'

 

[specopkirbs]

he downloaded the youtube js and css files edited and uploaded them to his site...if your not famiar with this id be carefull if fucking around with it he used thick box for the custom you tube player i believe.
ive just been playing with the css and added a related amazon products section on my posts pages...they arnt actually related really as they dont pull from the tags they are using the amazon data feed through a company called golden can that provide data feeds for all the major affiliate programs eg amazon etc tons more too im going to play around and see what i can come up with you can see the results of my trial with the amazon feed http://technicnews.com/more-ways-to-shorten-those-urls-unhub-and-lnkby/

 

[dynamicvb]

specopkirbs, I started playing around with this last night and got a blog up. I still have a lot of work todo having issues with the thumbnail images, but this looks promising.

Quick question, since you've had yours up for a little while now how is the traffic growing? Also have you done any off page SEO or link building?

 

[specopkirbs]

hey dynamicvb yeah im getting between 250 and 1000 uniques a day from a mixture of organic search engine traffic,social bookmarking,trackbacks,blog comments,and other aggregate sites, im going to hit it a fairly hard over the next week or 2 i think ive done a fair bit of blog commenting already and social bookmarking though ive been a bit slow on the bookmarking this week...ive found reddit to be a good source of traffic though as you probably know this is short term traffic though a few stories have hung around for a few days...actually peaked out at 2200 uniques the other day when i posted 3 stories to reddit about the twitter worm.
my alexa rank 7 day average is 77936 at the minute so cant complain really...shame i didnt do enough promotion before the google pr update really.

 

[dynamicvb]

Okay so you've gotten indexed which is good. I'm going to do some link building once I figure out these issues and modify the theme some. I noticed both Google and Yahoo bots where all over the site within a hour of me pulling in the first feeds so they are definitely looking at the content.

I'm going to dig into the theme files and figure out the changes you made. Hopefully you added some comments

 

[capzspace]

Great

 

[omoxx]

How do you guys do to put all that stuff( related videos, tweets, related posts ,etc ) in the left field, out of the sidebar widgets?
Please, help I am totally lost on that!

Please elaborate on Favicons placement too!
Thanxxx

 

[Fudnut]

How do you guys do to put all that stuff( related videos, tweets, related posts ,etc ) in the left field, out of the sidebar widgets?
Please, help I am totally lost on that!

Please elaborate on Favicons placement too!
Thanxxx

the code gets pasted into the 'single.php'. You don't use "Widgets" for YT or Tweet.

 

[DonKon]

Anyone know the best way to insert adsense, i tried using the all in one adsense but the ads are not showing up anywhere.

 

[neobyte]

I saw both techchuck and your blog looks the same, well as least cannot distinguish if you take a haste look.

You could make a package of all the pluggin, put up a manual on the change you have made, and sell it!