Showing posts with label Auto blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Auto blogging. Show all posts

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

ETSY SHOP OPEN FOR BUSINESS!

ETSY SHOP OPEN FOR BUSINESS!

By Strictly-Software

My Etsy shop is OPEN again - if you run a WordPress site and want some tools to automate your system then check out: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/StrictlySoftware

I didn't know the items in my shop EXPIRED after so long so the shop was empty to viewers for the last month and a bit but now you can buy your tools from etsy or my own site for plugins: http://www.strictly-software.com/plugins (please click on some adverts and help me raise some cash)

Also my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/strictlysoftware has information about these tools that you should read if you have purchased any of them.

It has help articles, guides on support, possible issues and fixes and much more - feel free to comment and like the page!

The basic idea behind these plugins is:

Run a site all year, 24/7 without having to do anything apart from some regular maintenance like cleaning tags that are not used very much and OPTIMIZING your database table.

So an RSS / XML feed contains your content (e.g news about something) and this goes into WordPress at scheduled times (Cron jobs or WebCrob jobs) using WordPress plugins like RSSFeeder or WP-O-Matic then as the articles are saved Strictly AutoTags adds the most relevant tags to it by using simple pattern matching like finding the most frequently used "important" words in the article e.g words in the Title, Headers, Strong tags or just Capitalised Words such as names like John Smith.

This means if John Smith became famous over night you wouldn't have to add a manual tag in for him or wait for a 3rd party plugin to add in the word to their own database so that it can be used.

Then once your article is tagged. You can choose to have the most popular tags converted into links to tag pages (pages containing other articles with the same tag) or just bold them for SEO - or do nothing.

You can set certain tags to be "TOP TAGS" which will rank them higher than all other tags. These should be tags related to your site e.g a bit like the old META Keywords.

You can also clean up old HTML, convert text tags to real clickable ones and set up a system where if a tag such as ISIS is found the tag Middle East is used instead. This is all explained on the Strictly AutoTags page on my site.

Then if you also purchase Strictly Tweet BOT PRO as well you can use those new post tags as #hashtags in your tweets and you can set your system up to either tweet to multiple twitter accounts with different formats and tags or tweet to the same account with different wording dependant on the wording in your article.



E.G if your article was about the Middle East wars you could say only post the Tweet if the article contains this word "Middle East" OR "Syria" or you could say only post if it contains the words "ISIS" AND "War".

The TweetBOT then lets you ensure the post is cached (if you are using a WordPress Caching System) by making it live first and making an HTTP request to it so it gets cached. Then it waits a custom defined number of seconds before any Tweets are sent out.

You can then specify a number of seconds between each Tweet that is sent out to prevent Twitter Rushes e.g. Where 50 BOTS all hit your site at the same time.

You can ensure no Tweets are sent out if they contain certain words, add tracking links e.g Google before the link is minimised by Bit.ly.

A simple PIN number process lets you connect your Twitter Account to your TweetBOT Account.

A dashboard keeps you informed of recent Tweets sent out, any errors from Twitter like "duplicate tweet", or if your Bit.ly account isn't working.

Plus a test button lets you test the system without sending a Tweet by taking the last post, running your settings through it such as shortening the link and post and checking all Twitter accounts are working and connected properly.

If you then link your Twitter account up to your Facebook page like I have with my Horse Racing site http://www.ukhorseracingtipster.com/ and my Twitter account @ukhorseracetips with my Facebook page facebook.com/Ukhorseracingtipster you get social media and SEO impact for free!





Check out the new live shop on Etsy for plugins and coupons if you need me to set the plugin up for your site:https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/StrictlySoftware

You may need help due to your sites special settings or requirements so a coupon will let you help you set it up correctly for you.

Wednesday, 12 November 2014

Twitter Rush caused by Tweet BOTs visiting your site

Twitter Traffic can cause a major hit on your server

If you are using Twitter to post tweets to whenever you blog or post an article you should know that a large number of BOTS will immediately hit your site as soon as they see the link.

This is what I call a Twitter Rush as you are causing a rush of traffic from posting a link on Twitter.

I did a test some months back and I like to regularly test how many hits I get whenever I post a link so that I can weed out the chaff from the wheat and set up rules to ban any BOTS I think are just wasting me money.

Most of these BOTS are also stupid.

If you post the same link to multiple Twitter accounts e.g by using my Wordpress plugin - Strictly Tweetbot then the same BOT will come to the same page multiple times.

Why? Who wrote such crap code and why don't they check before hitting a site that they haven't just crawled that link. I cannot believe the developers at Yahoo cannot write a BOT that works out they have just crawled a page before doing it two more times.

Some BOTS are obviously needed such as the major SERP search engines e.g Google or Bing but many are start up "social media" search engines and other such content scrapers, spammers. hackbots and bandwidth wasters.

Because of this I now 403 a lot of these BOTS or even send them back to the IP address they came from with an ISAPI rewrite rule as they don't provide me with any benefit and just steal bandwidth and cost me money.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (?:Spider|MJ12bot|seomax|atomic|collect|e?mail|magnet|reaper|tools\.ua\.random|siphon|sweeper|harvest|(?:microsoft\surl\scontrol)|wolf) [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR} [L,R=301]

However if you are using my Strictly Tweet BOT plugin which can post multiple tweets to the same or multiple accounts then the new version allows you to pre-post a page which hopefully gets cached by the caching plugin you should be using (WP SUPER CACHE or W3 TOTAL CACHE etc) before the article is made public and the BOT looking at Twitter for URL's to scrape can get to it.

The aim is to get the page cached BEFORE multiple occurrences of BOTS hit the page. If the page is already cached then the load on your server should be a lot less than if every BOT's loading of the page was trying to cache the page at the same time (due to the quickness of their visit). 

However if you are auto blogging and using my TweetBOT you might be interested in Strictly TweetBOT PRO as it had extra features for people who are tweeting to multiple accounts or multiple tweet in different formats to the same account. These new features are all designed to reduce the hit from a Twitter Rush.

The paid for version allows you to do the following:

  • Make an HTTP request to the new post before Tweeting anything. If you have a caching plugin on your site then this should put the new post into the cache so that when the Twitter Rush comes they all hit a cached page and not a dynamically created one.
  • Add a query-string to the URL of the new post when making an HTTP request to aid caching. Some plugins like WP Super Cache allow you to force an uncached page to be loaded with a querystring. So this will enable the new page to be loaded and re-cached.
  • Delay tweeting for N seconds after making the HTTP request to cache your post. This will help you ensure that the post is in the cache before the Twitter Rush.
  • Add a delay between each Tweet that is sent out. If you are tweeting to multiple accounts you will cause multiple Twitter Rushes. Therefore staggering the hits aids performance.


Buy Now


I did a test this morning to see how much traffic was generated by a test post. I got almost 50 responses within 2 seconds!

50.18.132.28 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:41 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "bitlybot"
50.57.137.74 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "EventMachine HttpClient"
50.57.137.74 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "EventMachine HttpClient"
184.72.47.46 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
204.236.150.14 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:44 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 471 "-" "JS-Kit URL Resolver, http://js-kit.com/"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:45 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
184.72.47.71 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:47 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:48 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
184.72.47.71 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
107.20.160.159 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "http://unshort.me/about.html"
46.20.47.43 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 369 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
173.192.79.101 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 471 "-" "-"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
46.20.47.43 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 369 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28863 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
66.228.54.132 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 106183 "-" "InAGist URL Resolver (http://inagist.com)"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28863 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
110.169.128.180 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "http://twitter.com/" "User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:15 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.131 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.127 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.131 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:17 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:17 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:18 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
65.52.54.253 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:19 +0000] "GET /2011/11/hypocrisy-rush-drug-test-welfare-benefit-recipients HTTP/1.1" 403 470 "-" "-"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:28 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
65.52.62.87 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:30 +0000] "GET /2011/11/hypocrisy-rush-drug-test-welfare-benefit-recipients HTTP/1.1" 403 470 "-" "-"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:45 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28860 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
107.20.160.159 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:59 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "http://unshort.me/about.html"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:46 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:01 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:07 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:17 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:17 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
50.16.51.20 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:21 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Summify (Summify/1.0.1; +http://summify.com)"
74.97.60.113 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:07:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28889 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"



Buy Now

Friday, 11 July 2014

Introducing Strictly TweetBOT PRO

Introducing Strictly TweetBOT PRO

By Strictly-Software

Today I created a premium version of my popular WordPress plugin Strictly TweetBOT.

This is the plugin I use on ALL my sites to automatically send out Tweets to various Twitter accounts related on the content of the article.

Buy Now


For example on my horse racing site UK Horse Racing Tipster I set up multiple TweetBOT Accounts that are linked to various Twitter Accounts e.g @ukhorseracetips and @ukautobot and when an article is posted the system uses the words in each accounts content analysis box to decide whether to send the Tweet out or not.

You can choose to
-Always send the Tweet.
-Only send it if one or more words are in the article.
-Only send it if ALL of the words are in the article.
-Don't send the Tweet if any of the words are in the article.

You can also prevent Tweets being sent if they contain "noise" words. This can be a list of swear words or other words you would never want tweeted.

Linking your accounts with Twitter is easy and using the new OAuth Twitter 1.1 API.

To link an account you set it up, save it, then when the page reloads a link will appear saying "Click Here To Authenticate", when you do you will be taken to Twitter where you login and are given a PIN number.

You go back to the plugin admin page and enter the PIN number in the relevant box. Hit save at the bottom and if the details are correct your account will now be linked to Twitter.

If you have already linked a Twitter account then adding another is easy as it will remember your credentials and authenticate it automatically.

The Admin dashboard will contain information on your last posted tweets and there is a "Test Configuration" button that will test all your accounts, links with Twitter and any problems you may have. Excellent for checking your plugin is set-up correctly.

The best thing about this plugin is you can use the articles post tags as #HashTags and with its automatic configuration with Strictly AutoTags it will wait until the tagging is complete before Tweeting rather than Tweeting on publish which would mean some articles wouldn't have tags at that point.

This is possible because of the new finished_doing_tagging hook in Strictly AutoTags which is fired once Tagging is complete. Other plugin authors are free to use this hook as well to ensure actions are only carried out AFTER tagging and not on the "onsave" action/event.


The PRO version of the plugin is only £25 and contains some very useful features especially if you are sending out a lot of Tweets or have an underpowered server. 

It can be bought on my site: Strictly TweetBOT WordPress plugin
Or on Etsy.com in my shop: The Strictly-Software shop.

The PRO version extends the performance features including those which enable you to send an HTTP request to the new article to put it into a cache (depending on the settings of your caching system e.g WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache) and ensure when the first visitor hits it they get a cached version of the page.

In the PRO version you can do the following:

-Add a delay of X seconds so that after the HTTP request is made no Tweets are sent for a while. This ensures the caching system has time to build and cache the new post.
-Add a query-string to the URL as some caching plugins require special keys or query-string parameters to force the page to be cached.
-Use a special user-agent when making the cache HTTP request. This enables you to track the requests in your Apache Access Log as well as white-listing the user-agent to prevent it from being blocked by .htaccess rules.
-Specify a delay between each Tweet that is sent out from your site. This ensures not too many Tweets hit your account at once and not too much Twitter traffic hits your website all at once. Staggering out your Tweets prevents Twitter Rushes and stops too many new Apache processes from being spawned.

Remember when one Tweet is sent out you will get at least 50 requests to the new post immediately from BOTS who have found the link on Twitter.

This is called a Twitter Rush and can cause major performance problems especially if you are sending out 6+ tweets (6 * 50 = 300 concurrent requests). You can read more about Twitter Rushes here.

Any messages back from Twitter such as posting duplicate Tweets or API errors will be saved and listed in your dashboard so that you can view the status of your last post and all the accounts it tried to tweet to. It will tell you whether the account matched the content analysis or was blocked and the result of any "sleep" or "caching" actions.

The PRO version also allows you to:

-Specify the maximum length a Tweet message can ever have e.g 137. This will ensure all Tweets are sent as sometimes when Tweets are exactly 140 characters long they still get rejected by Twitter.

-Turn off the link between Strictly AutoTags and Strictly TweetBot. If you are having issues with the combination OR just want Tweets to be fired ASAP on publishing whether or not tagging is complete you could turn this option on.

Reasons might be debugging or the use of categories or default hashtags instead of using post tags in your Tweets. If you don't need to use the tags against a post then there is no need to wait in the first place so this option can be disabled.


AutoBlogging - Automatic Posting On WordPress

Combining two of my plugins, Strictly TweetBOT and Strictly AutoTags, make a powerful force for any auto-bloggers out there.

If you are posting your articles by importing them from a feed then these plugins make your site a diamond in the dust.

Not only do you have do nothing but when your feed importer inserts a new article the Strictly AutoTags plugin will do it's job making your article a custom piece of work by:
-Basic content spinning by removing old HTML formatting as B I, FONT and SPAN tags
-Wrapping important tagged content in strong tags to highlight them and tell SERPS like GoogleBOT and YSLURP they are the important words in your article.
-Converting textual links like www.ukhorseracingtipster.com into real clickable links e.g www.ukhorseracingtipster.com.
-Converting a certain number of important tags into links to their relevant tag page.
-Adding rel="nofollow" to existing links in your article that don't already have them as well as those converted to links

Plus the SEO benefits are amazing (as my sites can testify) as the Premium version of the plugin allows you to find certain words and tag others. For example you could find words like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban but add the tag Terrorism. You can add as many of these "Tag Equivalents" as you want.

Also for your "Site Keywords", the words you want associated with your site, for example for my racing site it would be Horse Racing, Racing, Tips, Betting etc, then you can set them to be ranked higher than any other words when it comes to relevancy.

And of course you can specify that words in the Title, H1-6 tags, Anchors, Strong Tags and other content be ranked higher than words outside special format tags.

So the AutoTag plugin does it's magic (read more here) and then once it has completed and you haven't turned the link off between the two plugin the TweetBOT goes to work sending Tweets out to all relevant Twitter accounts.

The Strictly TweetBOT PRO Version is even better than normal because it allows you to stagger your tweeting so they all don't get blasted at once causing a Twitter Rush and because you can format each account differently you could have two accounts both going to the same Twitter Account but with totally different messages.

Plus you can use different tweet shortening functions for each e.g Tweet Shrink or Text Shrink.

For example if the article was about a horse race at Royal Ascot titled "Kingman destroys the pack at Royal Ascot" and the first account was using categories (Ascot, Racing News Horse Racing) as hash tags with the format:

Another Ascot news story %title% which you can read about here %url% %hashtags%

You would get:

Another #Ascot news story Kingman destroys the pack at Royal Ascot which u can rd about here bit.ly/34f53 #RacingNews #HorseRacing

And another account that uses post tags (Kingman, Night of Thunder, Royal Ascot, Ascot and many more) as #hashtags with the format:

Racing news from UK Horse Racing Tipster %url% %title% %hashtags%

Would give you this tweet.

Racing news from UK Horse Racing Tipster bit.ly/34f53 #Kingman destroys the pack at Royal #Ascot #RoyalAscot #NightofThunder #JohnGosden

Putting a time delay of 20 seconds in between each tweet would mean that the first tweet would get sent to your account causing 50+ BOTS and visitors to come and hit your new page (a Twitter Rush) and then 20 seconds later another tweet would be sent causing another lot of visitors. Staggering the tweets prevents Twitter Rushes.

Another new feature is the ability to send an HTTP GET request to your new post hopefully causing it to be cached by WP Super Cache / W3 Total Cache or any other caching plugin.

You have the ability to add another time delay after this request to give the caching plugin time to build the file as well as passing special parameters in the querystring (such as special keys or values required by caching plugins to force a cache).

You can also use a special user-agent to make this request so that you can prevent the request being blocked (for example if you ban blank user-agents like I do) or to identify the request in your log files.

If you don't want to use post tags as #HashTags you can use the articles categories or even specify default hash tags. The system will take the list of possible tags and then order them by size and try to fit as many into the Tweet as possible.

It will now even try and scan the title of the tweet looking for tags contained within the tweet itself and add a # in front of the word as this saves room and allows more hash tags to be used in your %hashtag% parameter.


Buy Strictly TweetBOT PRO

So if you want to aid your WordPress sites performance consider buying the Strictly TweetBOT plugin from my site or Etsy.com or if you download the free version please consider donating some money.

If you want to enhance your auto-blogging capabilities then combining the premium versions of both Strictly TweetBOT PRO and Strictly AutoTags Premium Version will do your site wonders as well as saving you time!

If everyone donated just a single pound for every plugin they had download from WordPress then I would have made hundreds of thousands of pounds by now and could spend my time developing plugins full time AND FOR FREE!

You can also buy a voucher from Etsy.com for £15 that will let you hire me to set the plugin up for you if you are having difficulties or are not a WordPress or Twitter expert. All I would need is access to your admin area to do the work.

Also if you haven't checked lately Strictly AutoTags has a premium version which you can buy for £40 and has LOTS more features than the free WordPress version. It also can be bought with a set-up voucher that you can purchase from Etsy.com.

Also if you could please visit my facebook.com/strictlysoftware fan page and "like" it if you could. Leave comments and pass it onto your friends and fellow WordPress developers.



Buy Now


Saturday, 24 November 2012

Strictly AutoTags 2.0.8 Released

Strictly Auto Tags 2.0.8 Released


I have just released a new version of Strictly AutoTags (or Strictly Auto Tags) which includes extra SEO options which will enable you to now not only wrap certain tags in <strong> tags but also link them to their related tag page.

This feature is called Deep Linking and the aim is that you can let BOTS find extra content related to your article quickly from the post.

You can control the number of words per tag that get deep-linked as well as limiting the deep-linking to tags with a minimum number of posts e.g only deep-link tags with 10 posts associated with them.

The benefit of deeplinking when you are saving a post and not as other SEO plugins do on outputting it is that you speed up the display of the article.

Remember you only save a post one or a few times whilst it can be displayed thousands of times (with or without a caching plugin).

There are also options to clean out the SEO options e.g remove the deep-linking and bolding when you save a post so that every edit gets a new AutoTag scan.

If you want to check out a website that has been using the plugin for sometime then check out www.ukhorseracingtipster.com and see the tags that are displayed for each article.

If you like the plugin and make a donation then let me know and I will add a backlink from this site to yours so that you get some free advertising and some PR / Link Juice from Google.

Check out the main Wordpress plugin repository to download the latest version or visit the plugin page on my main site.

Thursday, 30 June 2011

Why is Strictly AutoTags a good tagging plugin

Strictly AutoTags - Is it a good plugin?

As the author of the top rated Strictly AutoTags Wordpress plugin that at the time of writing has been downloaded over 35,000 times and still has 5 stars I am bound to be biased towards it.

You can read all about my plugin on my main website or view many of the reviews people have written about it on-line however I thought I would quickly list a couple of the main points which are often overlooked.

The main point is that Strictly AutoTags does not use remotely hosted API's to determine which tags to use.

Many of the other automatic tagging plugins use API's to retrieve a list of tags for their article posts. This involves sending the article to a remote site through an HTTP request and retrieving a list of tags in an HTTP response. The downsides of this approach are:
  • You are relying on a remote website and a working API for the tagging to work. If their server is down or their code is broken you will get no tags back.
  • You are relying on a 3rd party to keep a list of tags up to date. When new tags come out you must wait until they are added before they can be used. For example if a news story breaks that mentions for the first time the name of a major character within the story - say a baby goes missing or a banker commits suicide then their names are unlikely to be in any 3rd party list of tags until someone a) decides the name is worth going on the list and b) the list is updated to have the name on it.
  • You are using up bandwidth passing content back and forth from your websites server to the API server. Depending on the size of the article and the number of articles you are tagging this may or may not cost you a lot of money depending on your hosting package.
Why is the Strictly AutoTags plugin different?

Well for one it has the best of both worlds in that it uses your existing tag list to work out what words to use for post tags and therefore you can tailor your own tag list to words relevant to your sites content only and start off with as big or as small a list as possible.

Instead of using up bandwidth and relying on the 3rd party API to always be active and fast you can create your own tag list and do the same thing internally. It may not have the same size or depth of tags but you are not using bandwidth or spending time making HTTP requests to check for tags you might already have.

Another great feature is that it has an auto discovery feature which when enabled will automatically scan the content of your article for words or sentences that can be used as new tags. This is great for sites with no initial tag list as it will help build a list from scratch and it is also great for identifying the names of people who have suddenly become famous over night and are appearing in news stories before 3rd party API's have been updated.

Using my own proprietary code I scan content for possible new tags that match important English words such as names of people, companies, government office branches, football clubs and anything else that could be deemed important. This is all done without requiring the upkeep of a list of possible tags which 3rd party API's mainly rely on.

If a news story breaks about a fireman called Mike Johnson saving a baby named Amanda Jean Jones then these names would be identified as possible tags and if saved they are then available in future searches. API's relying on lists would need to add these names into their database so that users of their API could make use of them before they get tagged.

Another reason my plugin is pretty cool is that unlike some plugins that just match existing tags inside the content and then re-use them for that article my plugin checks to see how often the tags are used so only the most relevant and frequently referenced tags are added.

It also ranks each tag match depending on where it appears so that the tag "CIA" appearing in the article title or a H1 tag is ranked a lot higher than if the word just appeared in a paragraph inside the main content.

My plugin all ranks matches within all important kinds of HTML such as H1 to H6, Strong, EM, Bold, Italic and Anchor tags. A word within an H2 is ranked higher than one within an H6 or a Strong tag. These rankings are then used to order the tags so only the tags ranked with the highest score are used.

The admin user can configure the maximum number of tags that can be added per article as well as a number of other cool featured including the great for SEO option of wrapping tagged words in <STRONG>tags</STRONG> so they are considered more important than other pieces of text.

As well as being able to set up the plugin to ignore certain words or phrases as either case sensitive or case insensitive the plugin has a number of other options and I am constantly coming up with new ideas for it.

In fact I am working on a new SEO related plugin that is so black hat that I am having trouble coming up with a descriptive word for it that conveys it's total awesomeness.

If anyone has any ideas of what they would like to see in any Search Engine Optimisation plugins then please leave a comment or send me an email as the more ideas the better.

Anyway if you are currently debating on what kind of autoblogging tools to use for your Wordpress site then I suggest checking out my plugins Strictly AutoTags and Strictly Tweetbot two plugins that can save you huge amounts of time and give your blog or site an active online social media presence without lifting a finger.

Also if you are one of the 35,000 plus users of my Strictly AutoTags plugin and you have found it useful in generating you a nice a tag list or helped in driving traffic to your site then please consider donating a small amount of money to my site.

Remember that at the moment all my Wordpress Plugins are free and they take a lot of time to keep maintained as well as developing new features. Without your support I will have to stop my open source development and move back towards paid for applications which is only going to hurt current users so please consider helping me out. Remember any amount is appreciated!






Sunday, 12 June 2011

New version of Strictly Software Wordpress Plugins Released

Updates to Strictly Tweetbot and Strictly AutoTags

Last night I released new versions for two of my Wordpress plugins. You can get the most up to date versions from the Wordpress plugin site.

Strictly Tweetbot 1.0.5 released

The latest version of my Tweetbot which handles the posting of multiple tweets to multiple accounts whenever a new post is added has two new features.

They both offer the user the ability to shorten a tweet message so that it fits within the 140 character limit. One option is to use the Tweet Shrink API, the same API used by popular Twitter Apps such as Tweetdeck and the other is to use my own custom Strictly Text Shrink function which replaces common shrinkable words with text speak equivalents.

I have added a test function into my plugin that allows you to compare both methods with the last posted tweet so that the right method is used. There is of course nothing stopping you from using both together or neither at all.



The latest version of my auto tagging plugin offers the ability to add phrases to the noise word list as well as the option of splitting noise words up into two groups, case sensitive and case insensitive.

I have found that sometimes it is preferable to only tag words of a certain case such as the commonly used tag IT or WHO (information technology and World Health Organisation).

Whereas the capitalised versions are acronyms the lower case versions are noise words. Therefore to prevent lots of instances of the lower case version being tagged and bolded (when using the SEO option) it is advisable to put these words into the case sensitive noise word list.

Saturday, 1 January 2011

Strictly Tweetbot Wordpress Plugin

Automatically post tweets to multiple accounts with Strictly Tweetbot for Wordpress

If you are a frequent Wordpress and Twitter user then you might be interested in one of my plugins I have developed for Wordpress called Strictly Tweetbot. This plugin is ideal for news aggregators or auto blogging sites which need to run 24/7 and maintain an online presence across multiple spheres with little oversight.

Most people who make use of Twitter will post a message or two about new articles and it is a great way of getting content indexed quickly as you will see from my own investigation dozens of bots, SERPs and social media scrapers will visit your content as soon as a link is posted on Twitter.

Whilst there are many Twitter based plugins already available for Wordpress I found that they didn't really meet all the requirements that my own auto blogging sites required which were:

  • The ability to post to multiple twitter accounts
  • The ability to post different messages to different accounts
  • The ability to post multiple messages to the same account
  • The ability to decide whether or not to post to an account by checking the content of the message. For example I have an IT related Twitter account and on a certain site I only want to post messages to that account if the article in question contained certain IT keywords.
  • The ability to convert post tags or categories into hash tags
  • Using the new OAuth method of authenticating Twitter accounts without having to register each blog that uses the plugin as an application and consumer.
  • And of course the ability to automatically shorten the URLs

As I didn't require some of the other features such as the ability to post a tweet from my home page or create daily or weekly twitter digest posts I came up with my own plugin Strictly Tweetbot.

Used on its own it's great for auto blogging but when combined with my Strictly Auto Tags plugin that finds new tags within articles it means all my tweets have relevant hash tags appended to them.

Another nice feature is the reporting tool that enables you to view from the admin panel the last messages that were posted by the plugin as well as any potential problems with Twitter.

You can download the latest version of the plugin from Wordpress at: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/strictly-tweetbot/.

If you like this plugin you might be interested in my other Wordpress plugins:



Buy Now


For full details check out my plugin page at www.strictly-software.com/plugins/strictly-wordpress-plugins