If you are into autoblogging, feeds, rss, atom, aggregation, content, syndication, Wordpress, plugins, then you have likely heard of the WP-o-matic plugin.

This handy plugin takes a feed (rss or atm format) that you provide the link for and posts the contents on your self hosted Wordpress blog.

Here’s what you do to use WPomatic.

Download the wpomatic plugin

Visit the download page (or download the “fixed” version I provide … keep reading) at worpdress.org, extract the contents to your computer, then upload the plugin to your plugin directory on your web server.

Setup the plugin

Login to your Wordpress blog, click on plugins, Activate WP-o-Matic, click on Settings->Wp-o-Matic and go through the 4 step setup.

The setup includes testing that your web server has all of the necessary components for using this plugin.  Setting up a cron job to run the script on a scheduled basis (or letting a page load of your blog kick off the script).  I don’t recommend using the page load option as it might slow down the page load for the person visiting your site.

Add campaign

Now you are ready to add your first campaign.  Click on Add Campaigns and you are presented with tabs that say “Basic”, “Feeds”, “Categories”, “Rewrite”,  and “Options”.

Basic

Select a title related to the subject of interest.  This will also auto insert the same information into the campaign slug text box.  Leave the Active? option checked.

Feeds

You will need to provide the url of an rss or atom feed.

As an example, go to Google’s blog search and type in a keyword phrase.  Once results are returned, you will want to get the address of the feed associated with that keyword phrase.

You can use either the Atom or the RSS feed address.

wpomatic

You can find either of those two links on the left side – copy either link.

RSS link should look something like this:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=iphone&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

The Atom feed looks like this:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=iphone&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=atom

Take one of the two feed addresses and paste into one of the four the Feed URL text box under Add Campaign.  You could also add more feeds and WP-o-Matic will “blend” the results when it posts to your blog.

Categories

I recommend using the Quick Add option to create a category with the exact same name as the keyword phrase you titled this campaign with.

Rewrite

Skip unless you want to get fancy.

Options

Change the default frequency to fit your needs.  I typically change the Max items to create on each fetch to something less than 10.  Check the box for Post title links to source to give credit to the original source.  For discussion options, I typically choose Closed and uncheck the Allow pings option (just my preference).

Now Submit.

Done

That’s is how you setup your first wpomatic campaign.

Once you clicked on the submit button, you were given the message that said Campaign added successfully.  Edit it or fetch it now.

Click on the fetch it now link.

What happened?

Unfortunately, you probably received a message that said Campaign processed. 0 posts fetched.

So what gives, you would expect up to 3 posts to be made, but zero?

There is a piece of  code missing.

If  you are willing to mess around with some php code, then dig into the wpopmatic.php file and include the htmlspecialchars_decode command.

If you would rather skip the editing, at the end of this post is a download to the fixed version.

If you are interested in more details, the following video shows what was described previously.

[6:30] – the problem – wp-o-matic does not properly format the url.

[8:30] – the solution – edit line 1011 in the wpomatic.php file and add htmlspecialchars_decode to the line that formats the url.Or, save yourself the explanation and download wpomatic with the fix.

Here’s where you can download wpomatic plugin with the fix.