This week WP-o-Matic a plugin that allows you to set up an ‘auto blog’.
What is an auto blog?
An auto blog (automatically updating blog - not an automobile blog!)is a blog usually set up to make money on line through affiliate programs. The blog is set up to auto update with content from RSS feeds and has adsense or affilliate ads for monetising
WP-o-Matic pulls feeds from any RSS source (I tested it with Google Blogsearch and Yahoo news) and automatically makes posts. Links back to the original article can (and should!) be inserted. It can be set up to update automatically using the inbuilt WordPress feature or by setting up a cron job on a Unix server.
I’ve trying it out on a site I’m in the process of setting up and it’s working flawlessly. It can also pull images if they are present in the RSS feed. It could also be used with eBay and Amazon feeds but I haven’t tried this out.
First of all, apologies for the lack of a ‘WordPress Plugin of the Week’ for the last few weeks. A very busy xmas season at my folks in England followed by the start of a new semester left me short of time! But our regular series is now back!
I’ve been developing templates for BANS (Build a Niche Store) recently and have set up a web site to offer free and commercial templates. I needed a way to sell downloads easily and
WP e-Commerce from Instinct provided an easy way to do this. It was very easy to set up and is working flawlessly so far. You can see it in action at
Best BANS Templates. It has the options of a shopping cart in the sidebar or on the page, sets up product pages, an accounts page etc
From Instincts web site
The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an industrial strength elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind. Perfect for:» Digital Downloads!
» Bands & Record Labels
» Clothing Companies
» Crafters & Artists
» Books, DVDs & MP3 files
» Members Only / Subscription sites
» Stores with over 10,000 + products
A nice solution to your e-commerce needs!
We all know how important it is to backup your stuff! I’ve been running the WordPress plugin Wp-DBManager which does a good job of backing up my database, but I’m also trying out Blog Backup Online which claims to backup and restore all your blog content (posts and comments). At first sight this seems like a good service. At the moment it’s in Beta and therefore free. There is no information about the cost later. Registering a blog and scheduling backups was easy. A recently implemented service now saves all your post images.
A potentially very useful service is that you can transfer your blog to a different platform. So if you want to transfer all your content from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress account for instance Blog Backup Online will do that for you. Currently restore is supported for Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and Live Journal.
Continue reading ‘Backup Your Blog With Blog Backup Online’
Need a local copy of WordPress (or Joomla, Drupal, Moodle..) to work on without messing with your server? One that can work from a flash drive so it’s portable or can be easily installed on your hard drive? Thanks to Colin King over at CK Marketing I came across this very easy way. WOS Portable (Web Server on a Stick ) is a free, Open Source application for Windows. Head over to chsoftware.net and download WOS Portable, plus Apache, MySqL, PHPMyAdmin and the packages you’re interested in, TYPO3, Joomla!, Mambo, Wordpress, Moodle, OS Commerce, Drupal, Xoops and more.
Installation is easy and you’ll have a web server plus you’re WordPress installation up and running very quickly. I didn’t even need to set up a database for the WordPress install, it was done automatically.
I won’t put a detailed tutorial here as there’s an excellent one at Colin’s post at CK Marketing. He’s even provided a PDF version of the tutorial!
Have fun!
Theme Test Drive allows you to choose a different theme just for the administrator. Regular readers will still see the default theme. This allows you to safely make changes to your theme before you make them public. Great if you’re developing a new theme or just tweaking your css. Just make a copy of your theme, upload to your WordPress install and tweak away until you’re completely happy!
It happens completely transparently and they will not even know that you run totally different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while test driving.
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