BlogPiG plugins now update automatically!

The auto-update feature of BlogPiG plugins was introduced just recently so that the process of updating to the latest versions of our products is much easier for you!

Plugins that now have the this feature are:

• CloakPiG 2.2
• CommentPiG 2.1.5
• CSVPiG 2.4.12
• TagPiG 2.2.7

How This Affects You

We’re updating our products all the time based on your feedback so take a moment to read the information below on how you can upgrade your product versions in a couple of clicks:

Update notifications will be visible in the admin sidebar (Updates, Plugins) as well as in the Plugins list table.

Users can then view info about the latest version and can perform the update from within WP-admin.

The update is performed by WP via FTP. The user is then required to enter her/his credentials (for her/his FTP server).

Users should note that that when entering information into the “Hostname” field (on the FTP credentials page), they should enter “localhost” (not the domain name).

Below are some screen grabs to illustrate the update notifications:

Update Notification in Plugins List Table

Update Notifications in Sidebar and Updates Page

Status Box in BlogPiG Plugin with Auto-update Feature

Plugin Info Modal Window

FTP Credentials Page

Tags: CloakPiG, BlogPiG Plugin, CSVPiG, BlogPiG products, WordPress Plugins, wordpress plugin

Here at BlogPiG we’re busy updating CloakPiG and we’re also working on SocialPiG and some revisions to CSVPiG.  You know we love making software but this year we’d also like to offer you some more helpful content.

I know that some of you have found Gary’s knowledge-sharing posts useful, e.g how to build a Facebook business page or how to optimise your computer desktop, and we’d like to provide you with more information which can help you run your sites, your business, your PC or even your life a little more efficiently.

But, before we publish content we ‘think’ you might want to hear about, how about you tell me what you’d like to hear about?

I know some of you have asked for more more information about datafeed marketing (building online stores from affiliate data feeds) and we’re working on that but is there anything else you’d like us to shed some light on or get a discussion going about?

Do you have any burning questions about blogging or Autoblogging?

Is there something you’ve always wanted to ask about WordPress?

Want some hints and tips on anything? Reviews of anything?

We’re always going to spend most of our time working on the software but if we can help you make even more of our products by furnishing you with other information, then let us work on that too for you.

So, do tell me how we can help and enlighten and I’ll extract what gems of knowledge and experience I can from the team here and the other people and resources we have access to – all without the aid of scary looking headgear, I might add.

Look forward to seeing your input!

Fiona

Tags: Facebook business page, wordpress, wordpress blog, online stores, computer desktop, knowledge sharing, autoblogging, helpful content

“What would your dream WordPress plugin do?”

Leave a comment on the blog post with your thoughts (link below).

You can make it as crazy or realistic as you want!

I’ll keep the comments open until Tuesday morning and then choose a winner at random.

The winner can choose a lifetime Pro license to any one of our products.

You could be auto-tagging, auto-commenting or auto-publishing by Wednesday!

So, think about, what would your dream plugin do for you?

ps. Plus if we build it I’ll send you a free copy of that plugin too :)

UPDATE: This competition is now closed and the winners announced fell free to make more suggestions though as they could always end up being built and you’ll get a free copy if it is.

Tags: question, Dreaming, license, Win, comment, wordpress, plugin, winner

This is the first paid version of TagPiG we’ve released and as you’d expect there are a bunch of great new features:

• Archive Tagging – Now you can have TagPiG auto tag you all your existing posts as well as new one
• New Tag Sources – We’ve added the Open Calais API to the list of text extractors with the option to include social & topic tags
• Preferred Tags – You can create you own list of word that should always be tagged if they appear in a post regardless of whether the TagPiG chooses them
• Tag Now Button – If you’re not running your blog on auto you can now manually tag posts using a new button within the edit post screen

TagPiG really can help your blog get indexed deeper and faster by the search engines. Remember every new tag you create equals a new page on your blog. TagPiG can auto tag more than 50 tags per post!

You can try TagPiG out right now with our new seven day trial.

See exactly how Auto Tagging with TagPiG can help your blogs….

Tags: API, Tag, new features, plugin, WordPress Plugins, trial

I just give you a quick a run through of the latest Post Templates feature available in CSVPiG Pro. We think it’s pretty nice!

With CSVPiG Pro you can import any number of columns and you do not need to specify any particular column headers.

Instead everything is controlled after uploading by mapping column headers to particular WordPress content elements.

Click on the add new template link in the Post Templates section

Assuming you have already uploaded your CSV file you will see a list of the available tokens which can be used to design your post template. These are the column headers of your CSV file.

You can drag and drop these tokens into any of the WordPress content elements you wish. For instance you can drag %title% into the Title field etc.

Title – the title of the WordPress post

Slug – the string that is used when displaying the URL of the post. You can import your own separate column for custom post slugs. I usually just use the title token. If you do decide to use custom post slugs try to focus on the keywords that are used on popular search queries, and remember that the fewer keywords you use, the higher their relative value.

Post – the main content body of your WordPress post. You can put any HTML or CSS you want in this area and then drag and drop the tokens into the appropriate places. Here’s an example of a typical post:

<h3>Movie review</h3>

%body%

<ul>
<li>Format: %media%</li>
<li>Rating: %rating%</li>
</ul>

Download this movie instantly from <a href=”%aff_link%”>NetFlix</a> now!

You can include any markup you want inside the post template, images, css styles, bullets etc. Anything you can include in the usual WordPress HMTL post editor.

Category – the categories you want assigned to the post, multiple categories should be separated by commas in the CSV file. When saving as a CSV Excel will automatically enclose that whole field with quotes so the commas inside are not confused for field separators

Tags – the tags you assigned to the post, multiple tags should be separated by commas in the CSV file. When saving as a CSV Excel will enclose that whole field with quotes so the commas inside are not confused for field separators

Custom Fields – you can map any remaining columns to custom fields in blog posts. Custom fields are an extremely powerful feature of WordPress enabling you to include a lot of additional content within your posts. The basic guide to custom fields can be read here http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Fields . I often use custom fields to store product specific data such as price or id and of course my actual affiliate link. There are a variety of free WordPress plugins that can then be used to include the content of particular custom fields inside your posts automatically, often in a header or footer to each post. You should drag your chosen token into the value field and choose a name for each new custom field. If you need more custom fields simply click the add custom field link to add more.

You can create and save as many templates as you want. Once you’re happy with your template you should save it and then choose that particular template in the Publish section below.

More awesome features coming very soon!

Tags: import datafeeds, wordpress, csv import, post templates, CSVPiG, WordPress Plugins

I’m interested in buying commentpig but I’d like to try it for a few days. Is it possible?

We can’t issue a trial license at the moment. We do of course offer a full no questions asked money back gaurantee for 30 days after purchase which is much better than trialling it for a couple of days.

Where do the comments come from?

The comments come from a variety of sources. When running in full auto-pilot uses your selected matching criteria (probably a tag from your post) to find comments from:

• YouTube – videos that are tagged with the keyword
• Twitter – using your keyword to search for tweets
• FriendFeed – using your keyword to search for comments
• Yahoo Answers – using your keyword to search for questions and using answers as comment
• Own Comments – you can harvest comments from any source and clean them yourself before uploading as DB to CommentPiG, this is the most powerful way to use CommentPiG

Do you happen to have a demo blog to see this working?

Not currently only live sites that I’m not keen to expose, I’ll put up a demo site asap and post the link.

Can I install the plugin on several my blogs?

Yes you can install CommentPiG on as many sites as you own.

Do you guys do installations?

Not officially, i.e. we don’t have installs on the price list but we’re more than happy to help out if you have any problems. Installing CommentPiG really should be as quick as uploading and activating and WordPress plugin. The only that occasionaly requires a little extra work is the ioncube loaders as about 1/10 hosts don’t run them by default. Most will add them if requested.

You can read all about CommentPiG here

Just click the support tab at the top of the page if you have any more questions.

Tags: comments, wordpress, automatic, CommentPiG, plugin

You can use WordPress in built feed widgets to do exactly what your after.

Watch this 1 minute video

Go to Appearance->Widgets in WP admin.

Drag an RSS Widget over to your sidebar and rename it “Recent Tweets” or whatever you want.

Open your twitter feed in another browser tab and look for the “RSS feed of BlogPiG’s tweets” in the bottom right of the twitter sidbar.

Copy the link of the feed and then paste it into the RSS widget you still have open in WP admin. Mine was http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/21875500.rss

Choose “How many items would you like to display?” I chose 10.

“Display item content?” has no effect.

“Display item author if available?” has no effect.

I chose not to “Display item date?” it’s your call.

Save the settings and visit the frontpage of your blog to view your twitter sidebar feed in all its glory.

If you’re like me and don’t like the RSS badge next to the title of the widget then simply add the following code to the bottom of your style.css in your template directory and it will instantly dissapear.

.widget_rss img {display:none;}

And there you have it, Twitter updates in your WordPress sidebar in less than 5 minutes with no plugins!

Tags: wordpress, sidebar, twitter feed, rss, How To, tweets

I’m posting this because I’ve made a new commitment to give a bit more back to the ‘web’ in general, basically if I find some information or a technique I use in my business or here on BlogPiG.com I’ll post about it for others to find.

As it happens this is a technique I actually put together myself :)

The Problem

Most WordPress templates use a quote background image to enclose the blockquote content. The problem is that you CSS only allows one background image per element so you can only have an open quote image. I always thought this looked a little odd as you should really close the quotes too.

I found a couple of proposed solutions out on the web, the most interesting involved enclosing the the contents of the blockquote inside an additional DIV and styling that with another background image containing a close quote positioned to the bottom right.

This would indeed work but having to remember to add the additional DIV inside WordPress blockquotes would be a pain and it means you’d have to leave the WYSIWYG editor and switch to the HTML editor, an issue for some people perhaps.

In short it wasn’t elegant enough…

The Solution

I finally realised that WP already enclosed the contents of the blockquote inside another element, namely a paragraph ‘p’ tag. With this knowledge I could simply style the ‘blockquote p’ CSS to contain the close quote mark image and position it using margin and padding. Et voila!

WordPress blockquotes with a neat close tag automatically added each time I use them.

I centre my block and the text inside the paragraph but you should be able to style it exactly as you need with a bit of tweaking.

The CSS

/* Start blockquote */
blockquote p
{
width:100%;
color:#E6751F;
font-family:"Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Sans-Serif;
font-size: 16px;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
background-image:url('images/ClosePostQuote.png');
background-position:right bottom;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
text-align:center;
margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;
padding:0px 30px 15px 0px;
}

blockquote
{
width:75%;
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto;
padding:20px 0px 0px 35px;
background-image:url('images/PostQuote.png');
background-position:left top;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
position:relative;
left:-15px;
}
/* Finish blockquote */

Some Notes

I had to include the 0px margin in the p style or it doesn’t work, I have no idea why this is.

Add a contrasting background colour to both your ‘blockquote’ and ‘blockquote p’ styles temporarily whilst you adjust your padding. It makes it much easier to see what is going on.

If you’re centering the blockquote using margin left/right auto then don’t forget to offset it’s postion by the same amount as you right pad the paragraph. In my case the paragraph was right padded 15px so I positioned the block with a relative left -15px. This seems to maintain the centering nicely

I’ve checked this using Firefox, Chrome & IE browsers and all seems well. I’ve also tried it with lengthy multi-line quotes as well as single line and that appears to work without problems too (i.e this quote)

Please leave feedback in the comments if you use it successfully or improve it or maybe find it just doesn’t work for you.

Tags: How To, close blockquotes, blockquote, blockquotes, close quote, wordpress

We’ve just released a new update of CSVPiG to the WordPress Plugin Repository. This is Version 2.0.0.796

The key changes are listed below:

• Removed the ‘Disable Post Publishing’ check box
• Added a ‘Post Status’ drop-down box with the following options: Published, Pending Review, Draft and None
• Adjusted the initial settings file and some log messages

So now you can choose whether to import you posts as live posts or keep them as drafts for publishing later.

Tags: plugin, wordpress, CSVPiG, csv, post publishing, csv import, Download

TagPiG is an auto-tagging plugin for WordPress. TagPiG has been designed to overcome the manual bottle-neck by completely automating your tagging process. Here are some of the key features of TagPiG:

• Automatic post categorisation
• Automatic tag publishing
• Automatic tag filtering
• Automatic internal linking of common tags
• Automatic tag rotation

TagPig is simple to install and setup on your WordPress blogs. Once the plugin is activated it will run in the background, silently categorising, tagging and linking your blog posts automatically. With TagPiG installed you get all the great benefits of tagging without any of the additional manual overheads.

You can get an immense amount of benefit from correctly tagging all of your blog posts. Tags not only help you organize large quantities of content, but they also help define your site as a whole. If you post good content and you consistently tag every post you make with maybe 5-10 relevant keywords then, over time, your blog will become a very valuable resource to people interested in those keywords. They can actually come to your blog and get better, more reliable, less spammy, more focused search results than by doing a Google search! While this all sounds very desirable in theory the extremely manual nature of categorising and tagging blog posts has been a major bottle-neck for webmasters who build a lot of blogs and/or post to them frequently.

By Using TagPiG to automate your tagging will:

• Deliver additional keyword density into your blog posts
• Expand the keyword reach of new blog posts
• Get traffic boosts from Technorati and other tag aggregators
• Thematically organise your blog posts
• Provide an intelligent internal linking structure for your blog

TagPig has a comprehensive pdf user manual detailing every aspect of it’s setup, configuration and installation.

You can download TagPiG immediately here…

Tags: wordpress, automation, tags, plugin, autotagger