Social Solution

All of these Social Networking sites have been giving me a real headache since... well, since forever. There's too many of them. I can't keep track of everything. I've always had the idea of creating a service that'll link all of these together, check and update them all. Well, someone beat me to the punch.

Sara show this to me, but it's take me a while to post my results. Well, here I am.

Now, the other question is what am I supposed to do with all of these accounts that work as an OpenID, like Facebook? Do use one of these as my primary OpenID? Or should I go with one of the many OpenID providers? If so, which should I pick?

Ranger Whittaker

Amber, Chenoa, Stephan, Dylan and Zack Harper star in a random improv movie made illegally (without my permission) at my apartment while I was at work. Rofl.

Sorry about the audio quality. They used a non-digital video device (you know, those clunky old things that record to a VCR tape?) - and I had to spend three or four hours editing the video alone.

I CAN'T SEE WHITE PEOPLE IN THE SNOW.

PHP5, Scraping, and XPath

I've been building a scraper using PHP5 and the newly added XPath functionality. The idea here, as an exercise in programming, is to scrape complete records from Google Maps, including name, address, and phone number.

Here's a snippet of what I've been trying to do. This probably isn't the best approach, but I can't quite figure out how to pull a child of a resulting element, PHP is forever returning an error when I try to use firstchild.

//start our result counter
$i = 0;
//try setting higher than 1000
while ($i < 1000)
{
//show status so we don't get lost
echo "Currently extracting data from records ".$i." through ".($i + 10)."...";

$raw = new domdocument;
$clean = new domdocument;

//special to Google
$url = 'http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en&q='.$what.'&near='.$where.'&view=text&start='.$i."&radius=".$radius;

@$raw->loadHTMLFile($url);

$HTML = $raw->saveHTML();
@$clean->loadHTML($HTML);

$xpath = new domxpath($clean);
$xNodes = $clean->getElementsByTagName('td');

foreach ($xNodes as $xNode)
{
if ($xNode->getAttribute('valign') == "top")
{
//echo $xNode->nodeValue."\n";
$output .= $xNode->nodeValue."";
}
}

echo "...done\n";

//add to our counter
//10 results per page, so we add 10
$i = $i + 10;

}

//fix bugged double comma, can't figure out where this is happening
$output = preg_replace("/,,/",",",$output);

$somecontent = make_csv(strip_non_ascii($output));
echo $somecontent;

There's a bit of extra and unrelated code here, but that's the basic process I'm using.

Magic Marketing Button

I've been thinking about how awesome it would be to have a button with the text "Magic Market" on it.  This theoretical button would do all of the things I do on a daily basis, automatically, since most of them are menial and procedural anyways.  These would include:

<ul>

<li>StumbleUpon</li>

<li>Directory Submission</li>

<li>MySpace Promotion</li>

<li>Sitemap generation</li>

<li>Keyword Ranking Check</li>

<li>Backlink Check</li>

<li>Traffic Trend Check (Google Analytics!)</li>

</ul>

 

Oh, the fantasy. 

 

 

 

 

On second thought, maybe this is a viable project...

 

And tangentially, I figured out why this didn't post the first time.  I sent it to "blogspot.com" instead of "blogger.com".  Problem solved, and this makes it a bit easier for me to update, now. :)

RolePlaying Blog

I've been seriously slacking in getting RPGateway's blog up and running, but I've finally gotten around to re-posting the files and re-connecting Wordpress to the database. Now all I've got to do is to get a couple of our admins (and hopefully, one of our loverly owners) to start posting and managing it.

The idea here is to create a single update page where watchers who don't want to be involved in the site can still read updates from the staff. A buzz can be established, and hopefully, some real momentum can be generated with content that is updated daily. The so-called 'blogosphere' (I cringe too, relax.) is a very powerful force in the tubes today, and I think it's important to at least begin to establish some sort of presence here.

I was recently pointed to Trevor Somerville's 30 days to success, and I'm only reminded that articles are the Queen in a world where daily updates are King. Good luck to Trevor, I'll probably swing by once or twice to check up on his progress and see if he has any useful tips.

I started fiddling with some new posting options again, in particular the email posting. Blogger lets you set up a secret email to which you can send blog posts, at which point they'll automatically be added to your blog. I had a contact set up in my Gmail as of (insert long period of time) ago, and I sent a post to it, but I haven't seen anything of it. It looks like the same email, but... apparently not. I guess I'll be reconfiguring this later.

I've been having great experiences with SEO and RolePlay Gateway, we're rising in rankings rather quickly, even after the domain migration. Many thanks to the folks over at DigitalPoint for my education over the past few months. I'm sure I'll be telling these success stories soon, but right now I have to head off to Winston to run a few service calls.

Peace out!