Category: How To

Categories
How To MyCurator

MyCurator and Gutenberg Editor

MyCurator 3.3 and WordPress 5.0

This new version of MyCurator supports the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress 5.0.  There are now 3 different ways that you can edit your curated posts! We will outline each below and how MyCurator will work with them.

Gutenberg Editor and Blocks

The new Gutenberg editor works with Blocks.  In the MyCurator Options menu item, Basic tab, you will find a new option to “Create Gutenberg Blocks into Curated Posts?”.  Checking this option will have MyCurator create Gutenberg blocks for the title, excerpt, attribution link and any embedded images whenever you [Make Live], [Quick] or auto-post.  You can then edit these blocks.

Unfortunately, there is a bug in the Gutenberg editor such that when you use MyCurator Click-Copy (clicking on yellow highlighted paragraphs) the text is inserted but not actually saved.  You need to press the spacebar or key in some text after the click copy to get Gutenberg to recognize the text.

Gutenberg Editor Classic Block

If you do not check the Save Gutenberg blocks option, when you [Make Live], use [Quick] or auto-post, the post created by MyCurator will be a Classic Block.  Unfortunately, again there is a bug in WP 5.0 where the Click-Copy feature won’t insert the text at the cursor – it goes to the top of the block. To get around this for now, you can turn off Click-Copy (checkbox in upper right of saved page) and just copy and paste into the Classic Block.

Go Back to Classic Editor

If you don’t want to use the new editor, you can install the Classic Editor plugin and WordPress will operate like it always did.  MyCurator will automatically check if the classic editor plugin is activated and if so will automatically use it when you [Make Live] from a training post.

Categories
Articles Content Curation How To

I’m so busy with my business, how can I get content on my site?

I gave this presentation at WordCamp Atlanta March 2017.  Content curation is a great starting point for busy business people to get started with writing on their site.

Content Curation Atlanta

Categories
Content Curation How To

Using Google Image Search to Find Original Source

One of the hardest tasks in curation is tracking down the original source of an image.  Even if you start with the original source of an article, the images used in it may, and probably did not, originate with the same author.

To track down the original source, try using Google Image Search to find it.  Its amazing how accurate it is in finding multiple copies of the image on the web.  Unfortunately, it still takes a lot of digging to figure out which one is the original.  The following steps will get you started.

Finally, if you can’t find the source, make sure you use a thumbnail.  Using just a thumbnail, and not a larger or full size image, is good practice and seems to be a way to share an image without knowing where it is from.

  1. In Chrome, you can right click an image and choose Search Google for Images.  Otherwise go to google image search and drag the image into the search box.
  2. A page will open with links to where that image is found. Scan for an obvious source for the image.   Click on it and use the link to credit the image.  If it is a stock photo site, you will often have to pay to use it.
  3. Many times you’ll have to dig deeper, click on the “view other sizes” link.
  4. A new page will open with photo links of where the image is found. Usually the largest image is where the original photo is held. Scroll over the top of the images to see the site info. You may have to click through a couple sites before finding the original source.
  5. Once you find it link properly.
Categories
How To

What happens to all of the Images found by MyCurator?

You may find that your  Media library is filling up with images as MyCurator finds articles for your content curation.  MyCurator not only pulls in the full text of an article, it also collects the images found in the article.

MyCurator only stores one image per article in your media library, usually the first image it finds. All of the other images you see in an article are just links, they aren’t stored in the media library. Still, that may be a lot of images stored if you get a lot of training posts per day.

Fortunately, MyCurator always deletes images for any Training Posts that you do not make into a live WordPress post. Training Posts are automatically deleted after 7 days (you can change this in the Options Admin tab) along with the stored image. So while you may see a lot of images in your media library, it doesn’t grow forever, ending at about your average amount of Training Posts per week.

If you would like, you can turn off image capture by clearing both of the Image capture options in the Basic tab of the Options menu item.

Categories
How To

Why does the Source It Tool not find a Feed when I can see the Icon?

Source It is a bookmarklet: a little app that runs in your browser and lets you grab bits of the web.  Once installed, you can just click it when you are on a web site and capture the RSS feed for the site.  Sometimes though, you get an error that a feed could not be found.  In a few cases, this will happen even though you can see the RSS feed icon on the site or the site has a link to its RSS feed.

Continue reading “Why does the Source It Tool not find a Feed when I can see the Icon?”
Categories
How To

Run AI Process Timeouts

If you run the MyCurator article collection process manually (Run AI Process button on “the Topics page) you may have seen an error message such as “internal server 500 error” or it just hangs up on the Topics page screen.  Similarly if you look in the Logs – Process filter you may see the that the background process just stops without reading all of the Topics or Sources.  What is happening?

Continue reading “Run AI Process Timeouts”
Categories
How To

I’m Seeing a lot of Old Posts Found by MyCurator

I’ve noticed a lot of old articles keep reappearing in my training posts. Have authors started republishing their posts over and over again? Maybe curators are grabbing them and republishing the whole thing?

It turns out the culprit is twitter. If you are using a twitter search as a feed, you will run into this problem.

Continue reading “I’m Seeing a lot of Old Posts Found by MyCurator”
Categories
How To

Retraining a Curation Topic in MyCurator

Lets say you want to go in a different direction with your curation.  You are still focusing on the same topics and keywords, but you are looking for a different type of article than before.  With MyCurator, that means you want to change your previous training for your Topic.

Continue reading “Retraining a Curation Topic in MyCurator”
Categories
How To

Source It or Get It Display a Not Found or Error Web Page

When you first try out MyCurator, some clients find that the Source It and Get It tools display a “404 Not Found” page from their web site.  Another case is they display a “500 Internal Server Error” page.  In both of these instances, the cause is that the Get It or Source It tools are being blocked from operation by your host installation.

Continue reading “Source It or Get It Display a Not Found or Error Web Page”
Categories
How To

Removing Articles from Specific Sites

Do you get those annoying articles for job postings or pr releases all the time? This happens frequently when you use a broad alert or twitter search – see our previous article on content discovery. There is a way to exclude them from appearing in your training posts.

Continue reading “Removing Articles from Specific Sites”