Ask TomGPT For Getting Featured Images into Syndicated Posts

Against my better judgement (oh it was against the judgment of the web site owner) I am setting up the old school FeedWordPress syndication bus for the crew painting the Confabulating/Combobulating site for the upcoming Reclaim Open conference.

I have discovered finally a Chat AI thing I can live with and love, TomGPT which yes, lives only in my feeble imagination. But it does kind of work like this.

It so fits for the spirit of DS106 as the mothership site is still syndicating after all these years. The syndicated flow page’s pagination is broken but if you have been banging around the wordpress pipes you know there is usually another way (all syndicated posts are tossed into a Category). Well the flow page does have the counter going at 94940 syndicated posts brought in here going back to December 2010.

I had to review my own Feed WordPress 101 notes but also checked in on back end of ds106.us. The FeedWordPress plugin still works in the PHP8/Blocky era, though not updated in 11 years, confirmed in it’s GitHub repo.

It actually was not too much to get it set up, but alas alkways a vexing problem with FWP sites is that it knoweth not of featured images. This makes sense, because it aggregates RSS, and Featured Images is a WordPress construct.

What used to work in the past was findind a plugin that created a feature image from the first image it found in a post. I used in the p,ast the adoringly named FWP-SIC-em plugin by the author of FWP– oh last updated 9 years ago. I remember that it chewed memory on DS106 and besides, on a quick test on one of my old sites, it crashed badly in PHP 8. I thought that Auto Featured Image (Auto Post Thumbnail) worked, but it struck out in my tests.

I did find one I guess Mark installed on the site, Featured Image from URL (FIFU) which has a gazillion settings, but I did find ones that both generated one if it was lacking, and also would add a default one just in case. It also allowed me to specify that I wanted it to just process WordPress Posts, not Pages.

FIFU settings for default and creating featured images.

And BOOM, it worked. Case sort of solved.

But then El Presidenté of Programmistan, Tom Woodward chimed in (via an old school blog comment, aren’t those dead?) that he had whipped up a plugin to do this feat for FeedWordPress syndicated images.

I gotta try, right? I like this approach because its a single putpose plugin, not something wrapped up in a bunch of other code I do not need.

I almos felt like putting a wish out there was kind of like a magical TomGPT that we can all ask for little tools, and it spits them out, perfectly working. Hence the image I am guessing need to put up at the top of the post so it is grabbed as I think my cover / featured images are done via CSS. I really should test.

Thus this post. Which did require that I conjure up my own Non AI generated image.

Now that this post is tagged wildDS106 when the syndication bus stops by it should appear, hopefully with a featured image, at https://combobulating.net/.

Wild! DS106!

Featured Image: Applying the Browser Inspector (here is how) to recast chatgpt.com into a better brand, TomGPT plus a little background from Tom’s bionic blog. This could be pick your own license day, how about CC-BY? Gimme some attribution, will ya?