Re: FN-FORUM: Pictures and Content for Fan Site

date posted 12th January 2007 16:23

Quoting Creative Digital Alliance [EMAIL REMOVED]

> Just registered two domains to make a fan news site for a well known
> celebrity family who are moving to LA, no prizes for guessing who!!!!!
>
> Never tried anything like this before but am looking to either build
> the site traffic up and sell it on, or create a revenue stream from
> adwords or the like.
>
> Any one got any suggestions, especially for picture sources, as so
> many of the fan sites just use anything with no regard to copyrite,
> I'd like to keep it legal, but also need up to date pics on a minimal
> budget, content would, I'm guessing, be easily generated with RSS
> feeds, although I know absolutely nothing about this.
>
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated,

One easy approach would be to build a planet. That is, a site which =20
aggregates RSS feeds. The original app is called PlanetPlanet[1] and =20
is written in Python. I use a similar program called Plagger[2] which =20
is written in Perl.

Then it's just a case of building a set of RSS feeds which will have =20
content about your chosen subject. A good first cut might include:

* Google news feed for your subject's name
* Technorati search for your subject's name
* Flickr search for photos tagged with your subject's name
* Any other sites (e.g. blogs) that cover your subject regularly

For example, see Planet Dr Who[1] which is built from the following:

* http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/syndication/rss091.xml
* =20
http://news.google.com/news?hl=3Den&ned=3Dus&ie=3DUTF-8&q=3D%22doctor+who%22=
&output=3Drss
* http://news.google.com/news?hl=3Den&ned=3Dus&ie=3DUTF-8&q=3Dtorchwood&outp=
ut=3Drss
* http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/drwho
* http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/torchwood
* =20
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=3Ddrwho&format=
=3Drss_200

Took me about 20 minutes to build (and most of that was tracking down =20
RSS feeds) and the content is updated every 30 minutes using a cron job.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Dave...

[1] http://www.planetplanet.org/
[2] http://plagger.org/
[3] http://drwho.theplanetarium.org/
--=20
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Open Source Consultancy, Development and Training
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