WordPress is great when you need to maintain an blog or some other kind of archive, but if you don’t need that functionality it can be annoying. None of the tools on SearchGizmos.com , for example, work on your phone due to some kind of conflict between my JavaScript and WordPress’ JavaScript.
So I’ve been getting back into hand-coded Web sites! Thanks to JavaScript and CSS, you really can do a remarkable amount with basic tools. In this case I wanted to take some of the gizmos and put them in one place where they can be easily used in concert.
I think I hurt my head cramming it with CSS but I got MegaGladys working!
MegaGladys is a collection of utilities to find information about people listed in Wikipedia. At the moment it has the following tools:
MegaGladys: Get a summary of the person’s Wikipedia page along with listings of reference links, official sites, and social media accounts.
Gossip Machine: Analyze the person’s Wikipedia page view data by month (2017-now) to discover days with unusually high page views and search those dates via Google News.
TV News Search: Use the FCC license database to find American TV stations by city/state and search their Web space via Google. Your name query is automatically included.
Non-Sketchy News Search: Find media sources in Wikipedia by keyword, then bundle them into Google queries along with your search name.
Biography Builder: Get time-bounded searches of several reference sites based on someone’s birth/date dates (or birth to current date if they are still living.) Uses Wikidata.
Crony Corral: Check name pairs for Wikidata values they have in common, then find Wikipedia pages that mention them both.
PeopleLinx Affiliations Lookup: Search for several names at a time (even several dozen.) PAL searches Wikidata to find education, employers, and organization names in common and groups names with the same affiliation.
PeopleLinx Affiliations Filter: Enter a list of people and a list of companies/institutions/organizations, and PAF will use Wikidata to find any affiliations between the two groups.
I learned a lot about swapping divs in and out and how much you can do within the confines of one page. Unfortunately it’s giving me too many ideas at once!
