Ennui Blog

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Friday night is a tough day to be without Comcast. No leisurely Friday night net surfing or pay per view movies.

No biggie. We opted to fire up the home theater and snuggle up to watch Christmas movies instead. It was very nice.

So, we lived without Comcast on a Friday night. Not too bad so far.

Today we’re gonna go for a car trip with my parents to the Christmas Homes in Kouts, Indiana. We made it very clear that we had no money and that they would have to bankroll the day. They said OK.

After Kouts we’re going on to Bailey’s Discount Center in North Judson, Indiana then to the famous Fingerhut Bakery and the fun that is Toto, Indiana. Should be a fun day. It’s snowing and it feels Christmasy.

We won’t need Comcast today. Tomorrow will be a whole other story…

Stay tuned for more of Adventures Without Comcast.

My Comcast TV and Internet has been shut off. Let me explain. Due to the way my pay cycles worked over the past few weeks, I had to choose to pay rent and buy groceries instead of pay the Comcast bill.

I had hoped it wouldn’t get shut off, it being the holidays and all. But sure enough, on Thursday night, while I was working, the Internet went out along with the TV. Great.

I don’t get paid until December 16th.

It’s going to be a long 12 days.

I tried to get a reprieve on Twitter by reaching out to @comcastcares. I explained that I’ve been a long time customer, love their service and don’t intend on going anywhere. I assured them the bill would be paid on the 16th. But to no avail @comcastcares doesn’t seem to care.

TV I can live without, I rarely watch it anyway. It’s the Internet that is the problem. I won’t be able to work on my web projects and build my blogs. My wife won’t be able to do her homework and it’s finals week coming up.

So, until the 16th, my only access to the Internet is via my trusty iPhone. I can blog lightly from it and I intend to write everyday until the 16th about our experience living without Comcast for so long.

Maybe we’ll find out we don’t need it after all.

Last spring, I was in the planning stages of starting a website that would become a database of all the immigration policies of every country in the world. It was a daunting task (it still is!). I knew that I wouldn’t be able to set up the site overnight but I wanted to get the framework of the site going to that it would start building traffic for carefully targeted key phrases. I needed to create a ’stub page’ or a placeholder for each country, targeted for key phrases. These pages would build traffic and rankings until I would be able to actually write the content.

How could I do that when I had no content and no time to write it?

Welcome to the world of unique content generation.

Basically you use mad-libs (remember those?) to create this ’stub’ content quickly.

There are many programs out there that purport to do this, but they charge and arm and a leg. Anyone can do this themselves for free, as long as you have a little knowhow in MS Office and some data.

So, how do you generate web content from a template using MS Word Mail Merge, mad-lib style?

First, you need to think about what the pages will be about. For example, I wanted to create a stub page for every country that would basically target key phrases such as: immigration to comoros, immigrating to comoros, comoros citizenship, etc. There are two elements to creating these pages, a database and a template.

The database was simple. I needed a list of every country of the world. Then I used Mail Merge in MS Word to insert that country into the template, 300 times.

So, the first step was to get a list of every country in the world (thanks Wikipedia) and create an Excel database.

The next step was to write a country page template. I wrote six paragraphs of generic content using a template tag in place of each country like {country}. Then I put the template into MS word and opened the mail merge function. Once you load the Excel data, you need to replace your template tag with MS Word’s template tag. Once you’ve done all that, all you need to do is run the mail merge and have it open the results in a new document.

I ended up with 300 automatically generated pages. All I had to do at that point was cut and paste each new page into my Drupal CMS. There are solutions for importing multiple pages into most CMS’s with .csv files, but I was never able to get it to work correctly.

You can also write your templates with HTML, so you can add text bolding and hyperlinks. MS Word doesn’t care. It just looks for it’s tag to replace. Then you can insert this code into your CMS and it will show up as a page.

So, what was the result? I did all of this 8 months ago and the site has been very successful. I rank highly for many of the key phrases I targeted and have several hundred pages generating a ton of adsense revenue. About 40% of my Google Adsense revenue comes from Global Citizen Wiki.

Unfortunately, I was unable to roll out full country pages as quickly as I’d hoped. Doesn’t matter though, the site still has increasing traffic and rankings, despite the pages having no actual content on them.

Duplicate Content Concerns

I don’t really have to worry about duplicate content because each page is different. And the trick is to use your template tags in order break up any repetitive writing. This will ensure that each page appears to be unique content, which, in the end, it is.

I’m giving Squidoo a try after hearing a Webinar from Seth Godin today. I set up a page about how to choose a web hosting provider. We’ll see how it goes.

Check out How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider on Squidoo.

I recently created this list on Listphile. Listphile is an awesome tool that lets you create lists out of anything interesting.

Check it out!