Writer’s Block

I woke up today with nothing to write. That usually happens when I am in research or programming mode. These modes are necessary evils but they can throw me for a loop if I stay in either one too long.

I have also seen a tiny slump in my affiliate sales in the last few weeks. It has happened before at this time of the year. Not sure if the time of the year is the reason or what, but this also throws me for a loop. Panic mode. But sales are still better than any month last year so I need to quit my whining.

So with my head brewing 50 methods a second to catch this dip in sales, I ended up chasing my own tail for a day or so and not doing anything that would. So I took a breath and went back to the plan.

The plan was that this blog was going to be an extension of what I do to make money online. It would make my thoughts clearer on the subject, allowing me to work more efficiently. It would also expose those hidden elements of making money online that involve more than selling something and cashing the check for people out there now hitting the stumbling blocks I have already run into or am currently attacking. While others were exposing the easy parts, the cut and dried, I wanted to take on the hidden land mines.

How to Add Related Content?

I have been hunting for a way to put information related to a post in it automatically. That is the basic concept. In an effort to find something that would do this for me, I had to get more specific. I ran into reblogging and the semantic web. Somewhere along the way, I forgot my original concept and started chasing the details.

I have built some internet Rube Goldberg machines in my time chasing ideas like this, hacking a few scripts together to accomplish my goal. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it crashed servers. This time I wanted to do it right and I have been on this trail for a few weeks now.

So yesterday I posted a job at a freelance board. I figured I’d let someone else chase the issue. And today I returned to my cheapskate roots and started searching.

Old School Searching

Knowing that the problem was chasing details, I started an "old school" search process. Let me explain.

If you know what you are looking for, you can use precise terms. If you are still vague about your idea, terms you can barely define will only send you in the wrong direction. So I took the terms I used as general as I could, "wordpress rss plugin" and starting wading through Google results pages. I stopped about page 27 where the results started to get further off topic. This is what I mean by "old school" searching. Before Google, I used software called Webferret to pull results from multiple search engines 500 links at a time and then started clicking links.

Of course when you do this, you can come back with more than you started looking for. But at least I found what I was looking for, a few times. I promptly went back and canceled my freelance request, which got me thinking about a quick way to make some cash if you are good at searching. The lowest bid on my project was $90. I will let you figure out the rest.

The Results

The Content Related RSS Plugin – This is a very simple plugin to add feeds to your WordPress posts. But it uses a plugin that is no longer supported to extract terms from your post to add to the feed url. This was obviously written before tags became so widespread

Carp/WP – This one uses a separate installation of Carp to add feed items anywhere on your blog. The separate installation of Carp was an issue. I could do it, but why. Though visiting the Carp website and signing up for details was worth it. You get two free ebooks including one on using feeds to make money. This is on the list of possibles, but I kept looking.

Simple Pie Plugin for WordPress – For this one, you have to install the Simple Pie Core plugin first, but that is better than installing a whole new piece of software. This one is so customizable I stopped there. I think it will work for me. Won’t be up and running today, but I will be adding a special post just about that.

The Extra Bonuses

Part of the benefits of beating your head against the wall by searching very generally is finding things you never knew existed and can’t live without. Well, I can live without them but these are some nice plugins for the right type of site:

ContentGen+ – Automated reblogging through a plugin with feeds.

Scheduled Post Shift – Great concept. Automatically change the dates on your posts to republish them as new ones. Have your blog look like it is still active. Not that I would use it, but the ideas people come up with.

WP-o-Matic – A more complex way to republish feeds on your WordPress blogs.

Optimal OPML Browser – Turn your OPML file into a browsable tree on your blog.

Why All the Searching?

• With matched feeds, I can put matched delicious bookmarks in my posts.
• I can use Ebay feeds and their affiliate program to added related products.
• I can do the same with Amazon.
• Everything has feeds.
• For those that don’t, there’s Dapper and Feedity.
• To mix them, there’s Pipes.
• And for other things, there is a MySql Database and Triplify.

So weird wasted searches do pay off and off I go on another Rube Goldberg machine.

A while ago I wrote a post questioning the issue of reblogging. Posts are often reblogged on meme tracking sites which use an algorithm to detect popular stories and ideas. Posts are also reblogged to blanket certain categories or markets. And then some are reblogged by people with made for Adsense sites or splogs.

My reason for covering the topic was to create a more complete picture of what I am trying to present with a post. I can’t cover everything and if I write a post about feeds, it would be nice to have the past research I did on the subject not only readily available to me while I write, but also for the readers who want to dig deeper into the subject.

And what if after I wrote the post about feeds, brand new sites start popping up that extend the subject even further. If I bookmark these or tag them somehow, it would be nice for future readers of the post to have access to the new, updated links. That way the post itself becomes a growing thing, adapting to new changes.

Yes, I could go back in and update each post, but I write on a lot of topics. And the framework is here for a system that I am envisioning. WordPress has a API. Posts have tags. Delicious has a API. Bookmarks have tags. Flickr has an API. Flickr has tags. I could keep going with this if I wanted.

Of course, as usual, I was working without the correct terminology which I do a lot. I just really want to get something done and don’t really care how or what words are used to describe it. But I guess there is one: semantic.

And to continue not using terminology that seems overly complex to protect the average person from realizing how simple it really is, let’s define the semantic web.

The semantic web defines how thing relate to one another. In the system above, a bookmark will relate to a post based on the tags in both items. It also defines the properties of those items. A post is a post. A bookmark is a bookmark. Other properties are the dates and times of said posts and bookmarks. A more complex definition starts looking like the sentences you diagrammed in English class. We don’t need to go that far. To go into more detail, without that much detail, read Semantic Web: What is the killer app?

In other words, I can go to my blog to find my posts, to delicious to find my bookmarks, to Flickr to find my photos, to StumbleUpon to find my favorites… Or I can use the feeds of these accounts and a little bit of software to bring them to me all at once. If they are already categorized and tagged, why sort it all out again when you are writing a post?

The search is still on, though I have found a few sites closer to what I am looking for:

BlogRovr

I saw this as a possibility. It is a Firefox extension that suggests related blog posts while you are browsing. You are allowed to pick and choose the feeds you add to your own personal Rovr. I thought this would be great for linking out to other blogs as I write my posts, which added yet another dimension to the software I was looking for. But after I upload my OPML file and browsed around, I got very few suggestions at any blogs I visited.

Zemanta

Plain and simple, kicks ass. I thought I had found my answer. But there is no way to customize it so far. But it is damn worth looking into and this one I still have installed. It is a Firefox extension and it works with all of my WordPress blogs. It adds extra menus in the page itself instead of hanging off the side of the browser like BlogRovr.

The light orange areas were all added by Zemanta. Worth a look. But like I said, it would be nice to access the feeds I subscribe to, posts from my blog, and bookmarks from my delicious account so I could choose and not have posts from the top 300 blogs chosen for me.

Ligit

Close but no cigar. Plus I have to take a look at the links this thing puts on your site. This is not a javascript widget. It’s a PHP one and each followed link goes back through the ligit site.

Yahoo Pipes

This looks like it has some possibilities to build what I am looking for.

And again, whether or not my definitions are correct. I don’t really give a crap. Definitions never did anything. Action does. I am a man of action. If semantic no longer fits, I will use "contextual feed matching" or "why won’t this work ’cause it’s God Damned simple". And I will still be looking for this answer or developers or will do it myself.

And finally some other links of interest that I didn’t have time to investigate fully because I am not writing a thesis here:

• Lumifi
• The Top Down Approach
• Dapper
• Twine – Registered but didn’t get the invite.
• SemanticHacker – Damn I wish I had this technology. But I can access the API now.
• PingTheSemanticWeb

And for those of you who want to take it even further. What if the semantic web could be the knowledge base for an AI processor? A mind the size of the internet. Always the science fiction fan.

P.S. Since I use LiveWriter and then upload to my blog, I couldn’t add the Zementa links until I did. Here they are:

• Open Your Data
• Is Tagcow the Future of Photo Recognition

Which led me to Triplify. All I can say is that I would have never found these sites through Google (social graph?, get real).

And for now, until I find a way to organize everything around seed posts, everything gets fed into my Tumbler account, which I wish could import Delicious and WordPress tags. Is this the end of this post? I doubt it.