Bellicose Bumpkin

You might notice that I put ads on nemasket.net. You may have noted the irony that a post about casinos, like perhaps this one, might be accompanied by a Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun ad. The selected ads are influenced by the content. Why the ads?

I’m including them to help me defray the cost of running nemasket.net – both the modest monetary cost and the not-so-modest investment in time. Each time someone clicks on an ad, I get a couple of cents. I’m trying to keep them visible but not overwhelming. This will never amount to much money, but will hopefully help a little and inspire me to create better content that will drive more traffic to the site.

So there you have it. The secret is out – I like money.

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Technical gibberish warning
I’ve been using nemasket.net as a feed aggregator. It pulls in headlines from all the local blogs that I follow. It is using WordPress(blog/cms software) and a plugin called feedwordpress – an RSS and atom syndication doohickey.

This has mostly been working OK but had a manual component to it. Some feeds include the body of the post, a summary of it, or nothing at all. What I wanted was the post headline being a link to the original site (gladys, bumpkin, CST, etc) and the body of the post to be a citing of a small portion of the original post. I just couldn’t find a way to do it and ended up manually citing the original article myself.

As a computer guy, what I lack in skill I make up for in laziness. I can’t stand doing a task repeatedly. It drives me nuts. This lazy instinct finally drove me to automating the citing portion.

This post is to help me remember how I did it and maybe attract a more elegant solution from some superior geek that stumbles upon it.

WordPress supports themes – templates that give the site a very different look and feel depending on which theme you use. Inside the theme directory is an index.php file that controls the display on the main page – usually a listing of the site’s posts. With a little trial and error, I figured out that this line was displaying the actual text of the post:

   <?php the_content(__('Read more...', 'inove')); ?>

I re-wrote and added this stuff.

  <?php      # capture output buffer     ob_start();     # output post body     the_content(__('Read more...', 'inove'));      # assign post body(output buffer) to a string     $mycontent = ob_get_clean();     # get rid of any embedded php or html     $mycontent = strip_tags($mycontent);     # truncate the post body to 300 chars + ...     $myshorty = substr($mycontent,0,300);     $mycontent = $myshorty . " ...";     # print the post body     echo "<i>$mycontent</i>";  ?>

Short version
Nemasket.net should now take care of itself. Any readers using it to follow the local Internet stuff won’t have to wait for me to update anything.

If you have any blogs or local sites, you’d like include, drop me a comment.

UPDATE
As always, when something seems too difficult, it usually means there is an easier way. A builtin WordPress function will do the same thing my 7 lines of code do. This one line does pretty much the same thing – truncating the post at 55 words:

   <?php the_excerpt(__('Read more...', 'inove')); ?>

Work smarter not harder.

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Back in December ’08, I purchased the domain Nemasket.net, started a forum and played around with various things. Up until now, I haven’t found the right niche for the main Nemasket.net site – though I was perfectly happy using it to goof around and post video, audio, and misc. docs.

That niche is a portal for convenient access to all the local blogs and web-centric Middleboro activity.

Basically it fetches articles from any blog or local web site that I want and creates a stub article with a link to the original article. Periodically, I go in a add a brief summary or relevant quote. Along with this, I hope to regularly post audio, video, and relevant docs for town goings on like BOS meetings, Town Meetings, and so on.

Nemasket.net has been a site in need of a reason since I got it 1.5 years ago. I think this is the reason.

Thoughts and feedback requested.

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