Here’s a message to you wordpress spammers - if you’re going to spam my blog, at least show a little ingenuity.

If you want to drop your shit here, try to be a little more creative than just searching technorati for tags, then auto-posting some mindless drivel such as

PHP is a good programming language. Most people like dynamic websites which they can interact with, which PHP allows you to do.

I mean really, people, show some bloody creativity.

How about something like

I found your post while searching for simple tutorials on how to create a do while statement in PHP. Although your post didn’t answer my question, you’ve got some interesting posts here, I’ve subscribed to your feed.

See, now you’ve actually gone a little further than some generic bullshit that’s going to hit the trash as soon as I open up my comment moderation control panel

You’ve addressed a specific issue, and you’ve complimented me. I like you (or more to the point, your bot) already.

Another thing you might do is to ask me a question - you’d be surprised how well bloggers such as myself respond to being asked questions. We’ll probably even answer them, although you’ll never see the answer.

You could phrase your question like this:

I quite like your theme, did you do the header graphic yourself, or did you pay someone to do it? If it was professionally done, do you mind me asking who did it and how much it cost?

See, you’re interacting with me without even knowing it!

So come on spammers, get off your lazy asses and put some thought into your automated comments, I think you’ll find that your “stick rate” will be much, much higher.

Sometimes you just need a crapload of URL’s from Wordpress blogs. It’s nobodies business why you need them, if you need them, you need them.

Enter DaPimp’s Google Blogsearch URL scraper.

In a nutshell, this script grabs the fist 1,000 results of Wordpress blogs for a given keyword, and spits them out in a nice list for you.

**You’ll need PHP5, and a server with cURL enabled for this script to work**

Instructions for use:

1. You can either download the script here (change the file extension to .php), or just copy and paste the code below (wordpress buggers up the quote marks in code, so you’ll probably need to go and replace them manually -just download the script, it’s much easier)
2. Open the script in a text editor, and change the $keyword variable at the top to the keyword you want to search for
3. Save the script and upload it to your server
4. Navigate to the script in your browser, and wait, you’ll get your list

============ Start PHP Script ================

<?php

//give the script a keyword to search for
$keyword = “ipod touch”;
$keyword = str_replace(” “, “+”, $keyword);

//start a counter so we can number our results
$num = 0;

//set a start for our paging of Google Blogsearch (we’re going to be getting 10 pages X 100 results)
$start = 0;

do {

//Create the feed URL we’re going to get from Google Blogsearch
$feed = ‘http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=%22′ .$keyword. ‘+%22powered+by+wordpress%22&ie=utf-8&num=100&start=’ .$start. ‘&output=rss’;

//We’re using cURL to actually go fetch the page from Google Blogsearch
$ch = curl_init($feed);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed);
$page = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

//Loop through the feed, and suck out the URL’s
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($page);

foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item) {

//Add 1 to our counter, so our list has numbers next to the URL’s
$num = $num + 1;

$link = $item->link;

//Print our shit to the page
echo $num. ‘ - <a href=”‘ .$link. ‘”>’ .$link. ‘</a><br>’;

}

//Have a rest so we don’t get banned for hitting Google too hard and fast
sleep(30);

//Add 100 to the start, so we can fetch the next 100 results
$start = $start + 100;

}

//Keep doing this shit until we get to page 10 of the Google results
while ($start < 1000);

?>

============ End PHP Script ================

Well the DB backup didn’t quite go as planned for the move to the new server, so it looks like we’re starting from scratch here hey!

You’re going to want to stick around though, I’ve got some juicy, juicy stuff coming up, including some scripts which will make your life (be it white, black, or any shade of grey), a whole lot easier, and maybe a lot more fun as well.

As always, comments here are dofollowed, so know that you’ll get full value for your links if you get involved in the conversation.

Yeah I know the theme here is all screwed up, give me a day or so to get it sorted out,

Well I’m off to bed now, but I’ve got a post brewing for tomorrow, so keep an eye on your feedreader, or if you’re not subscribed, take the opportunity now!