Thread: ★★★ BlogSense ★★★ Content Automation Platform for Wordpress (Autoblogging & More)

NEW UPDATES


(Content Mixing)

A Fantastic new token system is in place. These tokens are little bits of code you can insert into header and footer profiles that will use the titles of posts to search for extra content and include it if it is found. A pdf that explains the token system can be found here: http://screencast.com/t/YTBjOWYxMWM

List of available Tokens:

• Amazon Content Token : Will pull itmes from amazon, and use their top rated customer review to upsell the content. (powerful for mixing in additional content)
  
• Amazon Widget Token : Will pull items' titles, and images, and create a icon+title row of relevant items.
  
• Ebay Widget Token : Will search for items and build a ebay widget out of them. This uses the code structure for Ebay's editor kit.
• Youtube Search Token : Similar to Amazon Content Token. Grabs the video, stacks it on the description with the video icon to the right of the description.
• Flickr Search Token : This will search Flickr for relvant images. But these images are always broad. Its best to use the custom flickr hook already available for hooking random images. In that there is much more control.

(Content Spinning)

If you have been spinning with BlogSense, you might have noticed the insanely long time it would take to do it's business. Well this was causing too many server crashes so I outsourced professional help. Now we can spin 2000 words in <1second (versus the 10 seconds it was taking) and we have even increased the power of the spin. Before the spin was opnly spinning 3 and 2 words phrases. Now we can spin 5 ,4 , 3 , and 2 word phrases allowing for better spinning.

As you may or may not know, BlogSense uses a phrase replacement system rather than a synonym replacement system to help preserve readability. It's a system very similiar to the Best Spinner and Magic Article Rewriter and might full just short of their power.

(Heartbeat.php , Bookmarking , Bookmarking Management)
http://screencast.com/t/NzQ4NDNhNzMt

Bookmarking is a fantastic way to get indexed, and I have been loving Ping.fm for this. One of the problems BlogSense faced was how to attempt to bookmark every post in a reasonable ammount of time when some blogs are trying to index 100+ posts a day. Well to do this we have built in a new cronjob system. Instead of running a cronjob every-so-often on /auto/cron_config.php, we now will run a cronjob once a minute on /auto/heartbeat.php.

Running a cronjob on heartbeat.php will allow BlogSense to check for new bookmarks to publish every minute. If a bookmark's time has come, BlogSense will fire it. At the same time we can now use inner BlogSense settings to define when our real cronjob(s) will run. If the time comes to check for new posts and publish scheduled posts, BlogSense will fire cron_config.php itself from heartbeat,php, and even email the output to the email of your choice.

Bookmarks are now auto scheduled 1 every X minutes. X is a random number between two numbers you define in your bookmarking section. This way when you source 50 new items, it will pace them out 20 minutes apart. BlogSense will always only attempt to bookmark 1 item at a time. If there is a backup on the bookmarking queue then BlogSense will keep working as normal until it katches up on itself.

Additionally, if you are a long time user of BlogSense and are not interested in the advanced bookmarking, your current cronjob will still run BlogSense affectively so you will NOT be forced to switch over.

(Twitter Hash Tags)

Thanks to the advice of one of our users, hash tags can now be appended to tweets for better audience targeting and and faster twitter account building.

(Yahoo Answers Redesign)

The Yahoo Answers campaign creation has system has been converted over to the new model which allows for solo-runs, campaign names, and direct imports. Only one module left now : Amazon module. Good things can begin to happen when all modules are on the same system.

(Yahoo Answers: Mass Campaign Creation)
http://screencast.com/t/MjJhYTFlMzQt

This is the start of a good trend. You can now use a list of keywords, or even use categories as keywords, to create multiple campaigns at once. Please see video:

(Keyword Effects)

Added ability to mass create keyword profiles based on keyword lists. http://screencast.com/t/MjJhYTFlMzQt

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How to Buy @ Discount

Latest Updates 7.0.0.2 ---

Thanks for being part of BlogSense! There is some very important information in this newsletter so lets get started.

Custom Source Profiles

We’ve added in backup-scrape parameters. What this means is now instead of 1 set of beginning and end codes for Title and Content grabbing, we can now program 3 sets of beginning and end codes. This will help us conquer sources who’s templating systems jump around such as Yahoo News (Which has also been improved in this version by using the backup parameters feature).

In addition, Wildcards can now be used to represent dynamic parts of html code. To call a wild card use this token: %wildcard%. These wildcards can be used in Source Scraping and RSS Full Content Scraping.
Example of Wildcard use:

begin-code: class=’sailboats_%wildcard%’ id=’%wildcard%’>

Improved Post Templating

I’ve completely restructured the way post templating is handled by removing header,footer,and title template profiles and having these templates editable directly in the area where we create a campaign.

This includes having the hook buttons (which allow creating manually selected pools of video or image content to include at random into posts) as well as BlogSense’s own automatic-content tokens (Amazon Widget Token, Amazon Content Token, Ebay Widget Token, Youtube Video Token)… and have even added in token integrations for phpBay and phpZon.

In addition to the above mentioned integrations, BlogSense also now gives the user the ability to create custom %tokens% that will be replaced by user defined content.

We might also see soon the integration of WP Robot Tokens and WP Mage Tokens as this is a major direction I’ve decided to take BlogSense in; an administration platform that detects and integrates the power of the other highly celebrated auto-content solutions.

BIG NOTE: Header Profiles, Footer Profiles, and Title Template Profiles WILL NOT carry over from 6.0.x.x to 7.0.x.x. Campaigns that make use of these will have to be re-dressed.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

(Mass Keyword Affects)
This feature has been improved and is running at top performance now.
Added title=keyword to a href links.

(Mass Search & Replace)
Now shows post ids of affected items after replacement.

(Yahoo Answers)
Improved preview mode to show answers.

(Twitter)
Basic Authentication was canceled for Twitter. We had to implement oAuth standards to bring Twitter posting back online. YOU WILL HAVE TO DELETE AND RE-ADD TWITTER ACCOUNTS. I’m sorry, there is nothing better I can do.

(Internal Code Structure)
Now we are using Wordpress functions to add posts to the database, rather than custom queries. I’m hoping this does not bring us any trouble, but as a development decision it was necessary for non-English Wordpress Installs.

Backdating

We can now select the date we want to begin backdating from.

Bookmarking
We can now limit which campaigns are bookmarked by BlogSense. For example, if you want a campaign to only post to twitter, then you can set it up that way. Likewise you can completely have campaigns omitted from any bookmarking.

Sometimes you might want to control the quality of the content announced to your social services. You might do this to improve your readership, acquire and retain more followers, or even to decease the chances of having accounts disabled due to overuse and clutter.

Custom Fields
Custom fields are now editable directly within the campaign rather than as a global setting, and in addition we also can use the second image url found in the post as a value or a custom value of your choice.

3rd Party Software Integration & Other Post Templating Improvements
BlogSense’s templating system has now shortcode creation wizards for WP Robot and WP Mage. So if you own these softwares then you can now use the power of their automated content.
BlogSense supports short-code creation wizards for WP Robot, WP Mage, phpZon, and phpBay.
In addition I changed two of the pre-included variables: %tag_1% and %tag_2% became %tag_title% and %tag_postbody%. These variables use the Yahoo Terms API to generate a tag phrase from the title of the post and from the content of the post.
Also the variable %campaign_name% has been added, which will call the name of the campaign.

Improved Spin Database
In a joint effort to improve BlogSense spinning capabilities, a couple of colleagues donated word-token databases from their personal collection for BlogSense possible use.
After manually reviewing the 3 databases I picked the best looking one and integrated it with BlogSense. I’m looking forward to your feedback on how this affects the overall experience.

Remember, there is a setting in your ‘Global Settings’ area that if set can allow you to replace synonyms as well. The default setting only replaces phrases.

Improved Campaign Creation Interface
Just some touch ups to make it more organized and look pretty;

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Whats new in BlogSense 7.4.3.1

The latest developments with BlogSenseWp automation suite.

YOUTUBE IMPROVEMENTS

• Added ability to grab videos by username in addition to the Youtube query search.
• Improved the automatic content token by adding an optional third parameter that takes keywords. This is by request so users can add amazon brand and model as search parameters when building Amazon mashups. I tested this technique out myself and the results are, well, very impressive. (See Video: YouTube - Youtube Token - Used with Amazon Module - Demonstration - BlogSenseWp )

INCLUDE AND EXCLUDE BY KEYWORD

• Until now, the RSS module has been the only module to have include and exclude by keyword options. This feature has now been expanded over all the module.

RSS FEED CREATION TOOLS

• How many of you have heard about the Five Filters project? Well, a modified version is now included within BlogSense now so you can use it’s power to create full content feeds out of feeds who’s items do not share the same author (mashup feeds). This will help you to use Google Alerts as feed sources.
• Email2RSS has been created and added as an RSS tool. I noticed that with WordPress’s default email-to-post tool I am not able to sort and categorize content as I want. So I created this class to help out the process.
• These two features can be found in the wordpress->rss tools section

BLOG CLONING & IMPORTING

• Create
  comprehensive blog backups including the plugin and theme files with
  their settings. Also backs-up posts and pages. These backups can be restored on the same blog; or imported into a new blog to create a clone.
• This new feature is located in the wordpress->backup tools section
• It is not designed for multi-site use.

Whats new in BlogSense 7.6.9.5

The latest developments with BlogSenseWp automation suite.


RANDOM POST TIMES


If the setting to randomize post times is toggled on (it’s off by default), then BlogSense will check for two parameters also defined in your settings; a minimum hour and a maximum hour. These numbers are based between 1 and 24 and represent the hours of the day. For each post, BlogSense will choose a random hour between our parameters for timestamp generation. Pretty simple eh?

ADVANCED REMOTE PUBLISHING API


This is a work in progress, but is designed for potential integration with other scripts and services. I’ve already made two videos discussing the API and one of it’s potential uses with the Google Reader App.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQbgWIBP9nU (Part I)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Txv0ug6h8o (Part II)

DEFINE POST STATUS BEFORE PUBLISHING

Many users have been requesting the ability to publish into draft mode or private mode or pending review mode. We've added in the ability to set this setting on each campaign.


COMBINE & MIX RSS FEEDS

This is one of those that personally I never found a user for but many of my users request due to an idea they have going. It's a cool feature and was fun to create... and does a damn good job.

How this works:

• Can create a single RSS feed out of multiple RSS feeds.
• Ability to sort by publish date ascending or descending.
• Ability to mix all items at random.
• This has been added as a tool to the RSS Tools Section.

RETAIN ORIGINAL DATES AND AUTHOR FOR RSS MODULE

Some users made case that unlike Autoblogged, BlogSense was not able to retain the original date of an article or the original author. So to eliminate this weakness these options have been added in.

Recently Added....

Advanced Post Template Editing

In order to make BlogSense’s templating system state of the art we now have the ability to edit some of the hard-coded templates within BlogSense. Here are the templates you can now edit to your liking:

1. Amazon Review Token Template
2. Amazon Widget Token Template
3. Flickr Token Template
4. (NEW) RSS Token Template
5. Default post templates for Amazon module & Video module.

Two New Tokens: [RSS] Token and [INSERT] Token

By request, we now have a token that will allow us to select a random item from an RSS feed and mash-it into our content.

The [insert] token will allow us to inject content into our posts in three ways, yes spyntax is supported. Just enclose spyntax in [spyntax][/spyntax] blocks.

1. [insert:middle]content here[/insert] – Inserts content into middle of post.
2. [insert:3p]content here[/insert] – Inserts content after the 3rd discovered </p> code.
3. [insert::1000]content here[/insert] – Inserts content after the 1000th character.

Drop Posting

Can now create campaigns in drop posting mode… but these campaigns cannot be automated. Campaigns are allowed to be stored for the sake of saving campaign settings for re-use.


Copy Campaigns


Now there is a button that lets us create duplicates of campaigns on the fly. Disable & Limit Comments

For the Sources, Youtube, Amazon and Yahoo Answers campaigns we now have the ability to limit the number of comments to publish or disable comments all together.

Proxy Support

Proxy support is fully active now. We have the ability to enable proxies for campaigns and/or bookmarking. We are also directly integrated with Proxy Bonanza.

The Best Spinner API

We now have the option to use The Best Spinner API for spinning content instead of the default BlogSense spinner. You must be an owner of The Best Spinner to use this service and usage is limited to 250 queries per day per account.

Bookmarking Section Improvements

We dropped Onlywire support. We added the option to post to ALL twitter accounts or to post to accounts at random. Each campaign still has option to enable or disable bookmarking for individual services for that campaign. Bookmarking also has it’s own section now and the log display service has been improved for better tracking. PingFM is still down unless you can hijack an API key from another pre-approved software…


Five Filters

For those of you who do not know what this is, it is a RSS tool that turns partial content into full content, and is used an alternative to scraping RSS full content from partial content feeds. In this update we increased the RSS limit to generate a max of 25 posts per feed (instead of the 10 item limit).

Link Cloaking

Added option to treat spiders like humans rather than redirect them to other parts of your blog.

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Alright Guys, that’s it for now. I’m going to make a round of improvements on WP Traffic Tools (http://www.wptraffictools) to get it ready for public release. Please take note that there may be a couple of undiscovered bugs here and there in this release. It might be prudent to wait a week before you update. For my power users please update asap so we can prove the stability of this release!

Hello, here are the latest improvements to the BlogSense Platform.

FOR POST TEMPLATING…

[new shortcode item]
We have a new content manipulation template tool : [SUBSTRING]. The substring shortcode will allow us to turn full content into partial content using numeric limiters. An example would be: [substring:0:500]%postbody%[/substring] which would limit the sourced content to 500 characters.

%Two New Tokens%
We now have two new tokens, %campaign_query%, which will call the query for Youtube, Yahoo Answers, and Source Campaigns. And %title_filtered%, which will call a version of the title that has had junk words stripped out of it so it might be used as a keyword for dynamic shortcodes.

[new shortcode item]
By request we now have a [GOOGLEIMG] short code that can be programed to search and insert google images based on a query. I’ve tested this out and it is very efficient at pulling relative images. It’s amazing. An example would look like : {googleimg:keyword here:1:275px:300px}

[new 3rd party shortcode wizard]
Some users are using the WP Prosperent to add Prosperent Affiliate items to their posts. BlogSense can detect if the plugin is installed and help the user create shortcodes using a wizard.

[wprobot shortcode wizard]
Updated the wizard to reflect the latest sources included into WP Robot 3.2.4

FOR RSS MODULE SPECIFICALLY…

Partial to Full Content Improvement
From within the campaign editing section we can select to use fivefilters or custom scraping parameters.

FOR SOURCE MODULE SPECIFICALLY…

Content grabbing improvement
We now have the options, both with pre-included sources and custom sources, to either use our custom scrape parameters to grab the content or to use the fivefilters class. This setting can be toggled within the campaign editing section.

FOR ALL QUERY BASED CAMPAIGNS…

Multiple queries are now accepted.
Traditionally only one query has been permitted per campaign. Now we can have multiple queries, just separate them with commas. Each time the campaign runs, for whatever reason, only one query will be selected out of the bunch. You can also use the new %campaign_query% to call the keywords in the post template.

BRAND NEW FEATURES and MISCELLANEOUS IMPROVEMENTS

CSV Importing
We can now import CSV files in an advanced manner using custom %token_variables% to call items. This feature has been directly tied into the Drop Posting module. Consider it in beta but it might just work perfectly out of the box. It works for my samples and it looks promising.
More Info here: http://www.hatnohat.com/forum/showth...=2625#post2625


Spin Features Improvement
Now we can select to spin titles only, content only, or both titles and content using our preferred spin method.

Auto Categorization Improvement
Auto-categorization has it’s own section now, letting you chose to toggle on off and providing options to search title for category matches, search content for category matches or search both as well as letting you chose whether or not to assign post to the first discovered category only (ignoring the post if no match is found) or assign the post into all matching categories including the default parent category or excluding the default parent category. (I really needed this feature for a personal project).

That sorts out this round of updates. I’ll be spending some time on WP Traffic Tools again before I begin adding another round of updates on BlogSense.

Here we go.

The one feature I needed:

Added two new token variables %image_1% and %image_2%, which will search the %postbody% token and return the first and second SRC URL’s found. I needed it because I use creating excerpts out of full content and wanted to grab and use the first image before it was stripped out by the excerpt creation shortcode.

I also made the excerpt creation shortcode ignore <p> and <br> tags when stripping html so we have some line breaks in our generated excerpts

More Advanced Auto Categorization:

We now have the ability to make customer autocategorization filters based on keywords… saying that if we find this keyword we will put it in that category.

Remote Publishing in Campaigns

Did you know BlogSense had a Remote Publishing API? Well it does, and it’s there to replace WordPress’s default Remote Publishing API. It can be used integrations with other softwares and php scripts too.

Well for our situation, we now can use BlogSense to automatically post campaign items to other BlogSense installations through the BlogSense API. Just add API URLS to a blogsense campaign and whenever that campaign runs it will also publish to your remote blogs. You can use this feature to send content to a remote blog and even spin the content before it publishes on the remote blog.

Anyway, this is for the more advanced venturesome type, and is lightly documented… but if you need it, it’s there and not too hard to figure out.

Added by request.

Got something good to say about BlogSense?
Here’s the thread that list the areas people are wanting reviews, and your help would be greatly appreciated. For the love of testimonials

Until next time,
Hudson