APACite.com

I figured I'd take a couple of days off working on VIPWithMe.com and mess with something new. I started working on APACite Site index last night. Was hoping to have the book citation code completed by this morning, but I only got about halfway there after running into a couple of roadblocks.

You can see progress so far at at: APACite New (it does not yet generate a citation, but you can view how it pulls the matching books based on titles you type in)

The idea is to create a copy of Son of Citation Machine but that will automatically fill out as much information as possible for you by pulling the data from the interwebs.

maybe im a dummy, but what does it do? pull context and tell you what book it's from? maybe i am way off base here.

No. Basically it's for lazy college students. When you do a works cited page it has to be in a specific format. The page takes the information you need and then properly formats it so you can copy/paste it into your works cited.

It's mostly a fun weekend project that should hopefully bring me a little bit of adsense income. If it's any indication citationmachine.net is doing fairly well on traffic citationmachine.net - Quantcast Audience Profile

Ahh pretty cool, this app was on ciatationmachine.net as well.... pretty cool.

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Cool project. Like to see you doing projects not standing still Sprite!

Books are now functional APACite New

The functionality is kicking citationmachine's ass

Going to do web page citations next. Then fill in all the missing one's that citation machine has.

Then port the code to do other formats such as MLA.

Basically the idea is to make it as simple as possible by pulling the data from the internet.

Type in any book title and click use book as soon as you see the match. It will automatically set the title, all authors, publishing year and publisher.

Went ahead and added MLA display for books too as it was a quick fix.

How are you getting a handle on SE promotion and monetization? you started any of those yet for your sites? I know you can code the crap out of them, not sure if you started any of the other stuff yet or not.

Nothing yet. Just threw a Google Ads banner on the top. Like I mentioned this is mostly a weekend project. I wanted to play around with the Google Data API as well as some HTML parsing and this seemed like a good project to take on for that.

I am not sure if amazon offers a referral program? If so I could possibly link the book titles to that.

Once I get the functionality completed I am going to SEO optimize page titles. I am also storing all generated citations [doesn't currently display them yet, adding that soon] so that Google can index those pages as well. Not sure if it would be smart to throw them into a RSS feed?

I'm trying to design this thing to be simple, functional and non-bloated.

Once useful function I might add is the ability to select all citations you want for a paper and then have the ability to print your works cited page directly from web browser [that way you don't have to copy them into word or whatever] or alternative generate it as a PDF file.

I am also using search engine optimized page links as you can see on this generated citation for example APACite Show

adsense banners can easily be optimized. you can work on that later though. test different positions when you start getting the traffic.

of course amazon is one of the biggest affiliate programs out there, only a 24hr cookie on landers and 30 days on products added to the cart. they have a simple get script for direct to cart though.

as far as caching the data, would it be good to store it and have load times faster and index thenm? then later add popular citations type features or quick reference for the most popular. those would be low resource additions.

APACite Show

Added ability to edit citations now. If I keep this functionality it's almost like a citation wiki. I could add a search to make it even easier for people to find citations. They could easily be tampered with though. Could add a captcha for editing them to prevent bots from messing with them at least.

Also added HTML stripping on any user input to prevent XSS.

Finally I threw in some more regexes to properly format the display. For example location input it will find the capitalize each word, then find the first two letters after a "," and capitalize though since the format is [city,state 2 letter initial]

Trying to make it as fool proof as possible, with citation machine you have to read the instructions and it's pretty much the same amount of work as looking it up in a reference.

Added a ton of new functionality. A few minor tweaks left and the book citations will be done.

I added an ISBN field [this is optional for creating citations, however supplying it will add the citation to the main index and it uses the ISBN to pull the thumbnail image for the book as well]. Going to add code tomorrow so that title and ISBN have to match.

I added a search page as well APACite Index

The search page will automatically pull up matching citations that other people have created as you type in the title of the book. If you are using a non javascript enabled browser it will show a search button instead of doing the auto update.

When going to create a new citation it will also pull up citations that matches what you are trying to get if they already exist.

Does the planet only give you one IP? they should atleast give you two, i suggest pointing this site to another IP to get it off the same one as VIPWITH ME since its adult related. I would do that before you get the whois bot crawling your site if they haven't already

Ok I think book functionality is pretty much done.

I rewrote the whole backend to use Amazon instead of Google. It is getting much higher quality of results. I also tied it in so that it uses my referral ID to Amazon on each book's detail page.

I added a few sample books here APACite Index

The only thing I have left to do before moving onto web page parsing is setthing SEO optimized titles for the individual pages.

I am also looking for a new name if anyone has any ideas since it doesn't just do APA. I'm having a hard time finding a suitable domain.

I bought citegenerator.com and citationwiki.com which one you guys think is better?

Between the two? citegenerator.com

citationwiki.com suggests a site with static content, whereas your site is obviously a dynamic app.

It's dynamic, except that I am storing the generated citations so people in the future can just grab a pregenerated citation if someone else have cited that book before.

Open to other suggestions, but had a hard time finding domains.

I decided to go with amazite.com will move things over there once I get a new IP for it.

Meanwhile the finished product can be found at apacite.com

I gotta get back to real work so will leave it alone and see if it gets any traffic. It ties directly in with the Amazon product catalog to pull any information it can get when citing a book.

Now how do I build traffic? Use the catalog submit, throw it up on digg and create a twitter group?

Don't build traffic until it's on the domain you want it to be and in place. New IP shouldn't take them long to get to you. What's real work, the other site? haha