Blog's Eye

You can use the Instant Content Plugin to create pages or post from these files.

Download the file that you like and then upload it to the instant-content-plugin directory under wp-content/plugins.

Astrology Terms. 983 short descriptions of Astrology terms.
example:
“PLUTO IN TAURUS (1851-1882)
A resourceful, industrious generation. Interest in material wealth, banking and finance.”

Bread Recipes. 3603 bread recipes from usenet forums.
example:
“Rye Bread Cornstarch Topping
Recipe By :Secrets of a Jewish Baker
Serving Size : 1
Preparation Time :0:00
Categories : Bread-Bakers Mailing List Miscellaneous & Tips
Ingredients
————-
1 cup water
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup water
While bringing 1 cup water to a boil, dissolve 2 Tbsp cornstarch in 1/4 cup cold water; whisk into boiling water until mixture thickens. Brush on loaf before slashing & placing in the oven, and again as soon as you take the bread out of the oven.
This glaze makes a wonderful crackling sound as the bread cools, a fine reason to sit down and enjoy your blessings after a hard day at the breadboard!
From Haacknjack.at.aol.com”

Cancer Terms. 4368 cancer and medical terms. Mostly short.
example:
“DCIS
Ductal carcinoma in situ. A noninvasive condition in which abnormal cells are found in the lining of a breast duct. The abnormal cells have not spread outside the duct to other tissues in the breast. In some cases, DCIS may become invasive cancer and spread to other tissues, although it is not known at this time how to predict which lesions will become invasive. Also called intraductal carcinoma.”

Chocloate Recipes. 168 Chocolate Recipes from UseNet.
example:
“Butterfinger Bars

Ingredients
2/3 cup white sugar
2/3 cup white corn syrup
1 (16 ounce) jar crunchy peanut butter
3 cups cornflakes cereal
2 cups milk chocolate chips

Directions
1 Heat sugar and syrup together in heavy pan until boiling. Add peanut butter. Mix until well blended. Pour over corn flake cereal , coating the cereal well.
2 Press into a 9 x 13 inch pan. Melt chocolate chips in a small sauce pan. Spread over batter. Chill for 20 -25 minute. Cut into bars”

As soon as the Instant Content Plugin is registered at the WordPress repository you can download the Frank Sinatra Lyrics database. This is about 450 songs. You can set it up so your users can have a song a day by Old Blue Eyes.

I modified the plugin to do posts as well as pages. The posts allow you to publish new content on a schedule so you can have new content appear every day or couple of days or every week.

My first instant content extra will be a database of 450 lyrics to Frank Sinatra songs. People will be having Frank-a-day posts. If it is popular I’ll do Grateful Dead or The Beatles next.

I expect to hear from the wordpress people (mind the capital P) any minute now (probably this weekend).

I submitted my Instant Content Plugin to the WP repository today. It should be available in a few days.

I have been working on some of my websites, trying to bring them into the 21st century. Copying data from the old static pages to WordPress has been a pain so I made a way of loading pages from zipped files containing text. The plugin reads the zip and loads the text files into pages. The first line of every file is the title of the page.

I find it easy to use notepad++ to edit a hundred HTML pages at a time and do global replaces to get rid of the headings, footers, sidebars, ads and other crap that has accumulated in these pages. It then takes second to load the new pages.

I am including a database of 325 business letters from one of my defunct sites.

Other databases that I happen to have are:

Cancer terms – 4300 one line definitions of cancer terms
Astrology dictionary – 980 short definitions of Astrology terms
Bread Recipes – 3600 bread recipes
Chocolate Recipes – 160 recipes for all things chocolate.
Patent Dictionary – 500 patent terms.
Jokes – 900 jokes, most offensive to women, fat people, short people, ethnic groups, religious groups, or people with good taste (This content is guaranteed to generate huge traffic from people who don’t buy anything).

There are other collections. My favorite is an old dream book that has a few hundred interpretations of dreams. There are potentially profitable ones like diet, fitness, drug dictionary, cosmetic surgery, insurance and a dictionary of HUD lending terms. There thousands of recipes. There is a file of 60,000 pop song lyrics that I will break out someday by artist.

I have yet to convert these other databases and I may never get around to it, but let me know what you are interested in.

I work in a JAVA shop, but since I’ve been a programmer for 40 years I get called on to fix the legacy apps floating around the workplace. I’ve used systems starting with Fortran (with format) in 1970. I’ve coded in a dozen flavors of Basic, COBOL, BAL,Mark IV, Focus, Ramis, Snowball, C, C++, Pascal, MASM, Java, PHP, and a bunch languages that I had to learn for single projects that I have since forgotten.

I maintain one app that uses palm pilots that transmit data to an Excel spreadsheet that updates an Access database that is linked to an Adaptive Server Anywhere 9.0 db. It is a Rube Goldberg setup.

The network people moved the server, changing the name and the IP address. In order to route through the very large network, the ODB drivers needs to have the string HOST=SERVERNAME in the Network tab connection string. The network changeover failed miserably due to badly configured ports on the switch so all departments who use the database on the renamed server were slow or knocked off the system. This it turned out was a red herring and the real problem would take a week to fix.

After getting it all working, the Access portion of the system still refused to work.

It turns out that when MS Access is linked to a remote db it remembers the ODBC parameters. Even when I went into ODBC setup and changed the server, the MS Access database still remembered the way it was set up 10 years ago. I had the idea to reconnect the linked tables last night in a dream. My mind is still working on this crap even when I am asleep.

I’d love to trash this system and replace it with an nice web based one with Java or PHP, but the powers that be won’t kill a system that still works.

I wrote a visual Songwriting page at my http://www.harptab.com site Visual Harmonica Tab Songwriter.

I wrote one for guitar tab, too: Visual Guitar Tab Songwriter

I have now conquered drag and drop (without benefit of some bloated framework) and I am thinking of applications where a visual editor in javascript would be a cool thing. It would be less flexible than flash, but very light weight (it would work on iPhones) and I could dynamically create complex web pages and save the results. I am currently writing the PHP code to extract the generated formatting and save it in such a way that it could be revised later using the same javascript code.

In the last week I have received payments to my PayPal account from Yahoo and Kontera. I had given up on these more than a year ago as being low yield advertising. I have not logged on to these accounts in so long that the passwords are lost and the email address that I used then has been deleted. I don’t know how I made almost $200 from ads that I no longer show.

I used one of my junkier domains, since expired, to experiment with alternatives to Google Adsense. Yahoo YPN delivered generic ads that were not specific to the content and I had very low click-through rates. Kontera delivered commercial product ads that were not related to my content and cluttered up my web pages with spammy links.

YPN is an alternative to Adsense, but when I ran code to split advertising 50-50 between YPN and Adsense, the Adsense ads outperformed by a factor of at least 5. Since then Adsense is making about 1/4 of what it made before the latest economic crash, but I am not going back to YPN.

Kontera was a great idea. When Amazon delivered Kontera ads I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month from it. It was not overwhelming, but my sites tend to be bookish and the Amazon clicks were free money coming in. Since Amazon dropped Kontera, the click throughs were very low and the ads themselves were obtrusive. I make no money from Amazon, now, in spite of having a few ads scattered around my sites (like the Blue Oyster Cult widget over on the right).

At the height of good economic times I figured to make $10 per 1,000 impressions. Now it is less than a $2.

The world has changed. Adsense has crashed as means of making money, down from thousands of dollars a month to hundreds a month. My eBay partner network income has been recalculated by eBay so I make about 1/3 of what I used to make. My traffic is 350,000 impressions per month, but that has dropped by 1/3 in the last few months. It is time to reevaluate how I monetize my domains.

This website is just a way for me to discuss tech stuff without annoying my more serious readers on other blogs. Most people could care less about programming , SEO and website monetizing. I get a few hundred unique hits a day here. Perhaps I should run some odd ads here to see who clicks on them. Tech people don’t click on ads, though, even if they aren’t running adblock.

I was hesitant to release this widget because it is so hard to describe. It does something simple. It shows a list of posts that match the keywords used in a search engine query. You never know what surfers are going to search for, so this extracts the keywords of every search and makes a list of related posts. They are related to the keywords, and not the page that they land on.

Google will drop users on what it sees is the most popular page for the keywords, but it may not be the best match. By matching the Google keywords to other posts, the users are more likely to hang around and try other pages on your site.

This is a simple idea, but hard to describe, hence the long title and obscure description. I think it is useful, but it may be a hard sell.

The guys at WordPress.org will get around to approving the widget in a few days, and I’ll see then how it does.

If you do a search on Facebook “like” plugins on the WordPress repository, you’ll notice that every one of them has had at least on user give them a low rating. There are no high rated Facebook “like” plugins that have 100% high rating.

I am led to believe that one of the authors has gone and trashed the competition – every one of them. Interesting, I am not sure who would have done this as all of them have at least one bad rating. I guess that the person who did all the bad ratings was reacting to someone giving his plugin a bad rating. It is a childish thing, and not all of the plugins can be bad.

Please, if you are a user of my Facebook Open Graph Widget, kindly go and rate it on WordPress.org. My plugin has been lost in the great number of Facebook plugins that appeared in the last month.

Posts and pages live in the database, but I have had a need in the past to create a page on the fly without it living in the db.

I’ve been thinking about how to fake wordpress into showing a post that is totally bogus without having a post in the db.

It turned out to be very simple. I hooked the wp action and checked for a 404. If there is no 404 then I told wordpress that it wasn’t really a 404 and supplied it with a page to display. WordPress thinks it came from the db.

Here is the code:

function kpg_f_content() {
	global $wp_query;
  	if($wp_query->is_404 ) {
		$id=-42; // need an id
		$post = new stdClass();
			$post->ID= $id;
			$post->post_category= array('uncategorized'); //Add some categories. an array()???
			$post->post_content='hey here we are a real post'; //The full text of the post.
			$post->post_excerpt= 'hey here we are a real post'; //For all your post excerpt needs.
			$post->post_status='publish'; //Set the status of the new post.
			$post->post_title= 'Fake Title'; //The title of your post.
			$post->post_type='post'; //Sometimes you might want to post a page.
		$wp_query->queried_object=$post;
		$wp_query->post=$post;
		$wp_query->found_posts = 1;
		$wp_query->post_count = 1;
		$wp_query->max_num_pages = 1;
		$wp_query->is_single = 1;
		$wp_query->is_404 = false;
		$wp_query->is_posts_page = 1;
		$wp_query->posts = array($post);
		$wp_query->page=false;
		$wp_query->is_post=true;
		$wp_query->page=false;
	}
}
add_action('wp', 'kpg_f_content');

Make this into a plugin or add it to the functions.php file.

I need to expand it to inspect the url for clues as to what to display, but this is the basic skeleton for creating a bogus page in WordPress.

I use the wp action and check for 404 because all the work is done. All I have to do is tweak the objects to make wordpress think it actually found a post.

I have lots of databases that I can convert to pages on the fly and all I would need is the links to the pages somewhere. I could even have the links as bogus pages and then one link from the sidebar to the top bogus menu and google will find them all.

You can add a lot more information in the post object like date, author, etc, but I am not concerned with making it perfect, yet.

This would be perfect for integrating store software or bbs software into a blog. Using the post structure gives you total control over the look of the pages while a little custom code can make as many fake pages as there is data.