I am probably taking a risk by uploading a plugin recommended to me by the author and downloadable only from their blog, but following an earlier comment on this blog I was moved to install the Yaab Autoblogger plugin.
So far it hasn’t stolen my identity, crashed my computer or created any other kind of unexpected havoc, so while I can’t give any guarantees, so far it looks as though I was right to trust the instinct that told me that Satheesh (the author) was not the malicious type…
Download and extraction was fine, installation was fine, and the plugin works. There are some friendly cartoons in the settings to let you know where you are, and although the language used is a slight variant from the English that I use, I could clearly follow what was going on.
I have to say that the principal inspiration for downloading this plugin to give it a spin was the hope that it might be able to cope with a wider range of RSS feeds than WP-o-Matic, which had trouble with certain feed variants.
Now, I do need to give the major caveats that I am (1) not very patient and (2) not terribly systematic, but what I found was that Yaab gave me feed URL errors with quite a wide range of feeds. The main news feed for the BBC news website - feed://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml - produced an error, as did a customised feed from the BBC: feed://newsapi.bbc.co.uk/feeds/search/news+sport/glam%20rock
A particular disappointment was the apparent inability of the plugin to recognise RSS output from Yahoo Pipes, for example feed://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ivS59KeM3RGF_9CarbQIDg&_render=rss&textinput1=glam+rock
I did get it to recognise the general feed from the Guardian newspaper:http://www.guardian.co.uk/rssfeed/0,,12,00.xml.
However, I’ll do a little more playing around with it and see what I can come up with! I might even dig around in the code a bit to see if I can work out what is going on in the validation stage.