Better Movie Showtimes Code

Google Search for Movie Showtimes Zip by Theatre or Movie

<!-- Google Movie Showtimes Zip by Movie or Theatre, gmh 9Aug2005 -->
<!-- search?q=movie%3A+&sc=1&near=37042&rl=1 -->
<form mehtod=get action="http://www.google.com/search" target="_blank">
<input type=hidden name=sc value=1>
<p><font size="4" face="Verdana">Movie</font><br>
<font size="4" face="Verdana">Showtimes</font><br>
<input type=text name=near size=5 maxlength=5 value="">
<font size="2" face="Verdana">Zip Code</font><br>
<input type="radio" checked name="q" value="movie:">
<font size="2" face="Verdana">Showtimes by Theatre</font><br>
<input type="radio" name="q" value="movie:+">
<font size="2" face="Verdana">Showtimes by Movie</font><br>
<input type="submit" name="B1" value="Submit">
<input type=reset value="Reset"></p>
</form>

See it work in the right side column of Quality of the Light just below the Amazon search window.

Google Zip Code Search for Movie Showtimes

<!-- Google Button Zip Code Movie Showtimes -->
<form mehtod=get action="http://www.google.com/search" target="_blank">
<input type=hidden name=q value=movie:>
<input type=hidden name=sc value=1>
<h3>Search Zip Code for Move Showtimes</h3>
Enter Zip Code>>><input type=text name=near size=5 maxlength=5 value=""><br>
<input type=submit name=btnG value="Search for Showtimes">
<input type=hidden name=rl value=1><br>
<input type=reset value="Clear Zip Code">
</form>
<!-- Google Button Zip Code Movie Showtimes -->

Monetized links

I put some of the Alexa/Amazon Associates features on my blogs last night. Not too tough, not too technical, but time consuming for someone who still does everything in NotePad.

For a crude implementation of what I would term monetized links try my blogs Quality of the Light, or Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:. On my sites I believe some incredible number of clicks, a thousand or so, will earn me something like a dime in Amazon gift credit, and purchases that can be traced back to one of my links provide some small Amazon gift credit.

Is it icky? Well, fairly, you could say that of my sites with or without the monetized links, they are little more than public doodling done on the fly with the barest of tools and perhaps intellect. The monetized link business is an experiment to get a handle on site traffic.

Monetized links are comparable to the referral credits offered by cell phone services, newspapers and other service vendors. Now, of course, the issue is did you ask me for a referral? Anyone who is constantly pushing referrals on you is a pain whether it's on the web or on the street, it is simply rude.

So to my mind the questions are: do I want to be associated with monetized links and should I disclose that my links are monetized? On a blog tasteless comes to mind more than rude, lot's of ad's and links to mercantile sites is probably more tasteless than rude, viewing is after all voluntary. Disclosure for Alexa/Amazon links is almost implicit in the link, but I suppose a statment that links are monetized should appear in the sidebar.

I have now included a disclosure in the footer of all my blogs.

If your BS in CS was awarded prior to 1986, welcome

Texas A&M at Corpus Christi generously awarded a BS in CS to me in 1986. I was one of the last graduates in an IBM 360/4535 environment. We ran under ICCF/DOS for most of my time in school. During my last sememster we changed from DOS to VM. My concentration was in COBOL, FORTRAN II, 360 assembler, and data structures. I am a dinosaur.

After graduation I promptly went to work selling industrial process controls in the petrochemical industry and never used my degree training in any meaningful way.

I bought an A model IBM PC with 5½" Tandon drives and installed a 20Mb HardCard, all for an outrageous amount of money at the time, nearly $2000.00. I connected briefly to Prodigy and other BBS's and at 1200 Baud I was not impressed. Other than to write a tag management routine in DBaseII for a very large industrial job I never wrote much code after graduation.

I never had any meaningful exposure to the Web or Windows until 1998 when I worked briefly as a bookkeeper for a small ISP startup in a small town in Oklahoma. My terminal which ran under an older version of Windows NT was, as they say, right on the pipe, directly connected to the T1 line. I was hooked immediately.

Now, some twenty years later I've decided to blog with very minimal tools.

Here in this blog I will present tips, tricks, and traps I've encountered.

Your comments are encouraged.