Your Codebank Invitation!
I'm inviting you to join the Codebank right now! It's filled with complete scripts, tools, code, tutorials, and programmers and designers to help you.
So I’m calling myself out publicly.
I’ve been planning on building a Geographical WordPress Plugin or Script that posts city/state/stuff to wordpress and every time I start to make it I think of something else I would rather do 
(hey it’s not a fun thing to make)
So how do you help? Leave comments telling me to get my rear end in gear.
Fair Warning: This won’t be done in a day or so. It’s complicated.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
So more involved than rss->post with feeds from craigslist, local news and icerocket? Now I’m interested; get your butt in gear and make it.
Give us more details and we might be more willing to harass you!
Geographical WordPress … I LOVE this title !
Yeah more details please !
O.K. well I set up the structure today for things. All 50 states and their cities.
I’ve set it up so you can set up your post structure using tokens for the city and state.
Also have a spot for keywords.
So you could do something like this ( I usually structure mine to “sell” the spot to someone or to be able to build links off it later – but it’s all to taste I suppose:
******************
Post Title:
(state),(city) (keyword) Restaurant.
Post Body:
I really love eating (keyword) at the finest restaurants in (city). I’m really not sure of my favorite place to be honest with you.
Leave me a note telling me what you think about your favorite place to eat (keyword) in (state). Don’t forget to tell me what city it’s in so I can find it.
******************************
Now I’m struggling with the next part. Obviously we need some more content. I can’t depend on any yellow page scraper because they change their page structure constantly. So I’m thinking a mix of things like ebay, shareasale items, rss feeds, video, etc….
But have it set up below the fold…….. so it’s not obvious to the casual browser.
I’m thinking I’ll let you put in a few different “post templates” for each run. That way you won’t have 50,000 pages with almost exactly the same content.
Now I use these to sell advertising spots……. and to sell links to seo firms (shh don’t tell google). In my case they already hire me to build links for them, so I don’t know if it’s a smart thing for you to try and get into (the link brokerage stuff is tough no matter what anyone says).
SO ANSWER ME THIS – WHAT CONTENT WOULD YOU LIKE? WHAT WOULD YOU USE THIS FOR?
I could see community board spin in this like with local girl scouts, softball league, and schools. With these things dear to your heart, there should be the spark enough to complete the project. Thanks for
all your information and resources.
I like this idea so far, now get it together!
Hi Ed,
what would be good is the ability to spin content in the post with a couple of tokens you could throw in – then you could get some sort of database list and feed that into the site and have the output ‘unique’ – if someone is prepared to put enough trouble into the spinning to make it complex enough
dean
You can’t rely on yellow page sites? Why not?
Can’t you grab Yelp reviews? Everything there is RSS’ed. I haven’t really looked at the RSS Structure, but I doubt it changes.
I just checked Yahoo’s API, you can grab their rating on businesses as well.
They have an API limit, so you may have to throw in an IP randomizer on your XML queries. Not sure how to do that.
Here’s the link:
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/local/V3/localSearch.html
Am I on point here, or have you somehow found those lacking?
Also – check this out…
http://praizedmedia.com/en/publishers
What you have there sounds great…like WFReview, but better. I would like to import from CSV because I do scrape YP effectively. Also, spin text is {a must|definitely needed}!
@david
I wasn’t familiar with yelp and I hadn’t even thought of yahoo’s local api. That’s why I tend to ask questions like this since I get awesome suggestions usually.
The yellow page sites usually change very frequently – I know I’ve had to redo several scrappers in the last year. I think between yelp and yahoo – and maybe a little SE scraping I’ve got a workable mix.
Keep the suggestions coming though.
@brandon – probably won’t have a import from csv option in this build. Might do something down the road, but since this is a whole country targeting project how would you suggest importing the data?
The way I’m setting things up you won’t end up with 50k pages at once – it’s more of a drip feed thing.
This I’m assuming will be in part an
offline marketing project. Am I correct?
Offline is the “bright shiny object” for
2009/2010. If it helps with that, then I’m
sure it will generate a lot of interest.
This is starting to sound really cool. Waiting for the plugin
I’m getting excited…
Here’s more API goodness (you are cool with using API’s right? I mean, if you weren’t too lazy, it would be really easy to build a site that actually adds value to the internet instead of polluting):
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/the-dealmap-the-mother-of-all-deal-sites/
An API for local coupons, with an affiliate revshare to boot!
I think this should round up your need for unique content!
You can tap into the Foursquare and Gowalla API’s. Maybe pull an XML feed every time the page is requested (up to a max that wouldn’t tax the server).
It’s doubtful that Google is indexing foursquare realtime. Grabbing some of their comments on local businesses will make your pages constantly updated, allowing Google to love your site. (YOu can grab ratings from Yahoo & drip-feed as well, but there’s not as much content.)
Not sure how well they’ll respond to this use of their API however…
http://foursquare.com/developers/
http://gowalla.com/api/explorer
Hey Ed: As much as you like playing with WPMU, we could have some real fun with a GEO script or plugin that is comaptible out of the box with WP3.0…One site that rules MainStreet… Hope you’re planning that from the get-go.
@mikey
I haven’t touched 3.0 and I have no plans to until it’s released and stable. Once that’s done though yes I plan to game the crap out of it in many various ways.
Although not automated it could provide content of all types.
Set this up for the various states and cities and contact clubs, organizations and groups as well as business to post their announcements and events as well as photos. The least they get is a backlink to their site if they have a site. If they have no site then you are providing something for them.
You get new original material. You could also become an authority and post an affiliate link on their pages as well as the main page. (Be careful to not mix strip clubs and the Boy Scouts of America pages)
Business could write an original article for a backlink.
Videos, trackbacks, blog posts…
just thinking outloud
Doug
Hey David – Drop me a note (or leave a comment with how to contact you). I’ve got something for you.
First off I am in way over my head so please bear with me or delete this comment.
John Ledger has a scraper called web data parser.
His demo video shows him pulling info off the web various ways.
Could a tool like this be developed or could this tool and your script be used together?
Doug
Agree with @David Jaeger, a yelp api integration would provide some nice content and review posts for a good scrape into a blog.
You’ve made yourself a nice militant readership here, i’m really glad i signed up to your email list.
And yes, kick your ass into gear, build your projects, be productive. Its something we all need to do. I feel like that if you can get past the first half an hour of working then your going to have a productive day.
Well,
Yelp didn’t approve me for the full blown api access. So we will be rotating through a few different api’s – but that parts done.
I would be very excited to see one. I am a small business blogger, and clients need to be in my area.
Another API you can grab access to is MerchantCircle. They are set up by location so it should be fairly easy to connect and scrape the info from them.
Business name, address, phone, they even offer coupons and newsletters form the users
http://api.merchantcircle.com/api/v1/docs
Here is the link to the Merchant Circle API Docs
http://api.merchantcircle.com/api/v1/docs