Content Sources: user input and the weather
On one of my sites, the subject matter is all about a different country, tourism and life in that country. Or at least one aspect of life in said country.
The problem area is that there is not all that much content that is usable, that has not been used 100s of times on other sites. I can write all day about the subject, but all of what I write has been written before in other words, on other sites.
Solution
The solution is to find content that is not created by me. Who else is there to create content? The users of the website themselves.
This site is not a Wordpress site, so I had to hand code a commenting solution. That was fialry straightforward. Now I have user written words to complement my own.
Over time, more and more comment on the individual pages should add to the ratio of content that make the site unique in it's field. We'll see.
Whether Weather will help my site?
I also thought about adding weather to the website as an extra source of `something` that might be useful to the site visitors. I just wanted an easy solution so used a javascript solution from weather.com;
It looks great, but after installing it I realised that this is not adding the the actual content as it's a JavaScript solution (meaning that the Search Engine Spiders cannot read it).
I had a think about a solution for this, and remembered somehting that I used years back on a short-lived website…
Airport Code
I found a number of PHP scripts that take data from the "Airport Code".
You basically plugin a code for the nearest airport to where you are, and you get the weather in return.
All the scripts I found were way too complicated for my needs.
No, RSS!
Then I thought of RSS. A quick search revealed two good providers of RSS Weather feeds; Yahoo and BBC.
For my needs the BBC RSS Weather feed is just right, and now my Weather solution looks like this on my website;
It brings all the information that a visitor needs, and suits my website layout perfectly. OK, so it's not as pretty as the weather.com JS script, but there we are. It's certainly more usable. And it does not have a load of external links like the JS version does.
I'm parsing the RSS feed through Magpie - this took all of 5 minutes to get up and running. I'm pleased with it.
Comment by Carine — August 31, 2007 @ 12:43 am
I've magpied a delicious feed of recipes on my site, though it took a little bit more time to make it an osC box on the home page and a module with more details, caching and making it multi-lingual … I never seem to take the easy route :p
that's the drawback if you know you can do it, just takes some more (night)time
Comment by Gary — August 31, 2007 @ 10:36 am
Carine, you've given me an idea for more content. Rss feed of a relevant delicious tag. Thanks
And I know what you mean about "doing it". I've gotten to the stage where I just say "what's the easiest way" - and that'll have to do.
I made this really cool script that produces a "tag cloud" of relevant (SEO) terms from a paragraph of text - I could have gone on and on coding more things into it, but got to the stage where I thought "hang on, why am I doing this. I don't need it, my clients don't need it…" 