World's Lamest Content Farm

John Levine, one of the OG Morlocks of the internet, notes that he has the world’s lamest content farm.

The world’s lamest content farm looks like it has a template for a web page with 9 links. Each link shows a randomly-generated human name. The URLs linked to are based on those human names. The images links to books John Levine has written, and oddly, to some fake eggs used to train chickens to sit on nests. Maybe a content “farm” inside joke?

I got some links including one to Petra Cody Carlene. Petra Cody Carlene’s web page also has links to 9, randomly-generated, human sounding names. Petra Cody Carlene’s server is at “petra-cody-carlene.web.sp.am”. That is, the Fully Qualified Domain Name is based on the human name. Hey, that’s a lot like this blog.

The note on the content farm’s web pages seems to indicate that they are generated by “IECC ChurnWare 0.3”.

First glance, this is similar to my own time wasting infinite web site. To a web scraping program, it’s quite different. My infinite web site PHP program gives web scrapers one web site with a lot of magnificent condiment and C-list celebrity valuable intellectual property. The World’s Lamest Content Farm tells a machine that there’s a whole lot of web sites left to scrape.

This is a really good idea, and I’d do it myself, just to trigger a different class of bugs than my time wasting web site. The problem is the near infinite number of domain names the world’s lamest content farm uses. John Levine runs his own DNS servers, because he’s exceptionally connected and knowledgeable. He can provide an IP addresses for his lame content farm’s many, many, many domain names. I haven’t ever run my own DNS servers. To do this kind of stunt, I’d have to learn about DNS servers, and convince the organization I bought my domain name from that I qualify to run them.