Help finding a script to generate personalised imitation news stories.

April 24, 2007 4:29 PM

Hi there collective mind, I need help for a project finding a script (preferably php) to generate personalised imitation news stories. Something like this or this. Anything which superimposes letters onto a nice background would be great. Failing that anything that will change certain parts of an article into names/user entered text would be fantastic. Electronic-free-beers on me to anyone that helps. Sorry for being such a programming-cretin.
posted by nickehsmith to Technology (3 answers total)

the first one is token replacement in pre-made text, like Mad-Libs; the second is just printing text over a particular background.
posted by rhizome at 8:39 PM on April 24, 2007

Response by poster: I understand the methods, but just don't know how to go about emulating either, you're speak to a complete noob, any hints in the right direction totally appreciated
posted by nickehsmith at 1:36 AM on April 25, 2007

Extremely easy to do in any language. This is simple string substitution. Here is a link on how to do exactly that with PHP. Make two files: form.php, and welcome.php. Insert the code from the first block into form.php, and from the second block into welcome.php. Make sure that works by going to form.php, and then just modify the fields as desired.
posted by wireless at 4:42 PM on April 25, 2007