Web help sought

Aug 24, 2010 12:32

I realise that there's probably some easy way of doing this, but I can't seem to find it anywhere - it's possible that I'm just phrasing the question wrong, I guess ( Read more... )

plans and schemes, request for aid

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Comments 29

paradigmshifty August 24 2010, 02:41:53 UTC
Should there be more to this?

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lokicarbis August 24 2010, 02:44:54 UTC
There should indeed - thanks for pointing it out. Fixed now.

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paradigmshifty August 24 2010, 02:46:08 UTC
Do you want this automated, or do you want to do it manually?

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lokicarbis August 24 2010, 02:52:11 UTC
Not sure what you mean.

My idea was to have generated automatically when a button was clicked on my page.

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paradigmshifty August 24 2010, 02:58:36 UTC
Looks like you have it covered down below - certainly better help than I could give you :-)

I had the idea that you wanted a kind of random slideshow of pages that you had selected from other sites. You could probably do that with an RSS feed aggregator.

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lokicarbis August 24 2010, 03:07:09 UTC
Something similar to a slideshow, but only titles and urls, and only two results displayed.

And no, I', afraid sly_girl's opinion of my coding skills, though flattering, is something of an over-estimation :( I can tinker with existing code, but I couldn't write something like this from scratch.

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sly_girl August 24 2010, 02:47:57 UTC
How random? Do you want random pages on particular topics, completely random, random with some taint checking or what?

There's two ways to do this. Both involve writing a simple bot to do the work for you. The first is to write a web crawler which just starts at some given point, then follows every link it finds. The second is to just feed random topics into Google, and link to whatever Google returns for you.

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lokicarbis August 24 2010, 02:51:09 UTC
Well, I wanted to generate the pages by using the "random page" links on sites like Wikipedia and such. Seemed like the easiest way.

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sly_girl August 24 2010, 02:55:08 UTC
Right, well RFC 1945 is a good place to start :) This will tell you how to have a basic conversation in HTTP. You need to write a script that will telnet to Wikipedia (for example) on port 80, and ask to see a random page. What you'll get back in reply is some headers and a bunch of HTML. You can search the headers for the URI and the text for the title.

Maybe practice doing it by hand a few times so you know what to expect.

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lokicarbis August 24 2010, 03:05:15 UTC
This is way above my skill level. There's a whole bunch of assumed knowledge in it that I just don't possess - HTML and CSS is about as far as I ever got :(

To be honest, I was kinda hoping someone could just point me at a script site and say "this sounds like what you're looking for".

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mrben August 24 2010, 03:59:36 UTC
If you were the one making up the list of random webpages, it'd be pretty easy for a script on your page to pick one of them and display it, sure. If you want something else to do the random picking and interesting-page-sourcing for you then that's more difficult.

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lokicarbis August 24 2010, 04:06:24 UTC
Well, my initial thought was use outputs from the Random Page link on Wikipedia, but that doesn't seem to work too well.

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the_funkmeister August 24 2010, 04:08:19 UTC
lokicarbis August 24 2010, 04:13:20 UTC
Well, it looks like a fun toy and I might add it anyways, but so far as I can tell it's too narrow for what I have in mind. Will install it and play with it anyways.

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the_funkmeister August 24 2010, 04:38:27 UTC
If you want to go the "extract content, display bits of it" route -- this one might be up your alley too:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/

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lokicarbis August 24 2010, 04:42:22 UTC
Not so much, as this only appears to work for RSS feeds.

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