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Is There An Article Summary Macro

AlexRAlexR Cape Town
in Feature Requests
I've been focussing on the article aspect of the program for last few days and was wondering about article summary. I generally choose the first paragraph paragraph that occurs in the article and use this as an Article Summary.

I was thinking that if we had a macro that:
1) Grabbed the first paragraph from the article it would make it much neater, rather than having to copy and paste a large chunk of text everytime we change the article. (Fine to do it once, but if you are doing it for a few hundred projects it becomes a pain) 

Another option would be:
1) Have a macro that grabbed a random paragraph from article but it excludes paragraphs that:
a) Last paragraph.
b) Has any html or other tags. (like image or video tags, etc)

Option 2 would create a much more unique article summary as it would change and vary on every submission. = MORE UNIQUE CONTENT! 

Or am I missing an obvious and easy solution?

Comments

  • OzzOzz
    edited April 2013
    so you want to use html in summaries? not a good idea is suppose as that is not allowed on many site if i'm not wrong.

    furthermore i believe to overoptimizing things (i will call it "macronizm" from now on) can do more harm than good. what if huge parts of possible target urls are disallowed by webmasters because of links in summaries, too many links in articles, etc.??? that wouldn't help you at all. keep it simple.
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @ozz - I think you misunderstood me. 

    What I am suggesting is a macro to just grab the first paragraph. (This way, all we need to ensure is we don't have any HTML in our first paragraph in our articles. Easy enough to do) 

    OR a macro to use a random paragraph, but it must select a paragraph that doesn't include any HTML. 

    This solution would simplify the use of SER tremendously. 

    We could just focus on generating articles and not worry about summaries as SER would handle this. One less field to worry about or make mistakes on. :-)
  • OzzOzz
    sorry, my bad.
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @ozz - what do you think of the idea now that I've explained better? 
  • theorbitaltheorbital
    I think it is funny. I saw a "macro" question and didn't even need to read who started the thread. :) I can't blame you for trying to be as efficient as possible.
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    :-) 

    It just seems to me there should be a macro that grabs the first paragraph from an article and uses that as the summary. Would add a huge amount of value. 

    Are you writing seperate summaries or just using an existing paragraph? Would be curious to know!
  • ZeusyZeusy
    I just copy/paste 1st paragraph all the time.
  • ronron SERLists.com
    edited April 2013

    Alex, I think you should change your username to 'Macro'. I think I am with @theorbital on this one.

    Further, I think we should have a tag on this forum for macros.

    Also, I think Alex should be creating one big post where he lays out a summary where he uses them - as no one uses macros more than him.

    I know that I need to use them more, and we all could learn a lot. Yeah, there's a manual on macros. But I would rather see a post from someone who uses them all the time in real life.

  • ZeusyZeusy
    question on using file macros.

    Is it not faster if the information is ALL in the project?
    If using the file macros, it will need to acess the files on hdd.  If it does that, does it access the files every time it does a post?  Wont that slow things down?
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @zeusy - you will have to ask @sven on this regarding speed.

    I think an article summary macro would save us all a lot of time. :-)
  • ZeusyZeusy
    Sven -0-0-

    If it doesnt slow things down, I might redsign all my projects to use macros.

    So, the question is Sven:

    Does SER project read the macro, build the content from the files, EVERY time its about to post?
    Does it only read and biuld the content once, when it's started?

    Does using macros in projects slow SER speed down?
  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    It's reading the macro content on submission to make sure it is as dynamic as possible (in case you change files with external program).
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @sven - would it be possible to use a macro for article summary? This would be super super useful! (That just grabs first paragraph or if to make it more content more unique and random as per option 2 in original post) 
  • seagulseagul
    Use a SSD with SER you will see a big boost in LPM
  • ZeusyZeusy
    edited April 2013
    Seagul - "Use a SSD with SER you will see a big boost in LP"

    this was what I was thinking actually.  Already been looking for good ssd server, found few, but price his nearly double what Im paying on berminghosting. Got any recommendations?
  • seagulseagul
    edited April 2013
    Nah sorry I don't use VPS. I'm a cheapskate :P
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @sven - would it be possible to use a macro to pull out the first paragraph of an article so it can be used as an article summary? Would save us a ton of time and make it far more efficient! Most people are just copying the first paragraph from their article and this could be solved using a macro. 

    (or a more complicated solution would be to grab a random paragraph that doesn't have any html markup code in it at all) 
  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    next version has %first_paragraph-<varname>% ... you can use e,g. %first_paragraph-article% and it tries to inserts the first paragraph or first 250 chars (tried to trim to last sentence/word) here.
  • davbeldavbel UK
    edited May 2013
    +1 for AlexR doing the macro post.  I toyed with them in some campaigns, but never really spent the the time to work out exactly what is do-able...

    Probably me being lazy, but it's always seems easier just to throw up another campaign
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @sven - You are the best! I can't tell you how useful this will be! Brilliant!  :)>-
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