instant dada

Just a small project idea for in case anybody is bored: write a small web toy that generates random blog entries in the style of a given blog.

My mental image would be basically to have a form in which the user can paste a URL. What the user should get back is a formatted blog post (maybe even using the right templates), and also html code that they can paste back into their own blogs.

You'll also want to figure out how to retrieve the individual blog posts, perhaps by using a feed-discovery mechanism. The result should be a single post with title, text and maybe even comments. Haskellers, especially newbies, might be particularly interested because it'll give you a chance with the Haskell XML stuff for parsing the RSS, PFP (for the text generation?) and HApps (for the web front-end). Many of the pieces are there. I remember seeing an RSS parser and a random text generator floating about, so it might just be a matter of cobbling things together.

If you're sucessful, you might even kick off one of those memes where people dada their own blogs as a post.

Just a small project idea for in case anybody is bored: write a small web toy that generates random blog entries in the style of a given blog.

My mental image would be basically to have a form in which the user can paste a URL. What the user should get back is a formatted blog post (maybe even using the right templates), and also html code that they can paste back into their own blogs.

You'll also want to figure out how to retrieve the individual blog posts, perhaps by using a feed-discovery mechanism. The result should be a single post with title, text and maybe even comments. Haskellers, especially newbies, might be particularly interested because it'll give you a chance with the Haskell XML stuff for parsing the RSS, PFP (for the text generation?) and HApps (for the web front-end). Many of the pieces are there. I remember seeing an RSS parser and a random text generator floating about, so it might just be a matter of cobbling things together.

If you're sucessful, you might even kick off one of those memes where people dada their own blogs as a post.

instant dada