Archive for the ‘Autoblogged’ Category
Keeping Autoblogged from Crashing Your WordPress Blog
September 30th, 2009
My time with Autoblogged has been a bit of a love/ hate relationship for me. By automatically turning RSS feeds into blog posts it has dramatically improved my Google Organic search traffic, and has brought in large numbers of visitors from Twitter. Unfortunately it has a tendency of crashing my server. Even my new virtual server has been crashing one or two times a day under the load of Autoblogged.
Honestly I’m using the software to it’s maximum capacity so the blame does rest on my shoulders.
I have come up with a few techniques to get as much out of Autoblogged as I can without crashing the system. Those techniques are simply:
- Use Yahoo Pipes to create and filter a single RSS feed out of all the RSS feeds that I want Autoblogged to use.
- Point Autoblogged only at the single RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates and then limit Autoblogged to only import up to 5 posts at a time. This keeps Autoblogged from using all the CPU resources by limiting the amount of time it will be activated. (Feed –> Feed Settings –> Feed Processing –> Post Processing)
- Have Autoblogged run every 5 minutes. By running the plug-in often, but limiting the number of posts per cycle this allows for a large number of imports without risk of crashing the server. (Settings –> General Options)
- Under “Images” section for “Feed Settings” uncheck the “Create local thumbnails for each image”. This uses far more resources then I originally realized. Simply turning this off has dramatically increased the speed for importing posts.
By doing these simple steps I have dramatically improved the performance of Autoblogged and my site in general. Autoblogged was causing a lot of downtime under it’s original configuration, but now it works like a dream.
Checkout Autoblogged at http://autoblogged.com/
And Yahoo Pipes at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
