4 Ways to Enhance Your Blog With FriendFeed

Date May 28, 2008

FriendFeed is great mechanism for sharing information and discussing topics around the social web. I’ve blogged about it before, and so have many others. There are many people who have successfully embedded Twitter statuses in their blog as well as other RSS information. The term “Lifestream” has been chosen to denote updates from your “social graph” and many have implemented this idea on their blog, including myself. In this post, I’ll explain multiple ways to add FriendFeed information to your blog. Note, these have been tested on Wordpress 2.5.x and should work on other platforms unless noted otherwise.

  1. Add the official FriendFeed widget to your blog. This is done by navigating to http://www.friendfeed.com/embed, and then inserting the supplied code to your blog.

    FriendFeed - Embed

    You can install this in your sidebar or on a dedicated page simply by copying and pasting the code supplied in your blog template.

  2. Modify the official FriendFeed widget to embed certain services to your blog. I learned this yesterday from Paul Buchheit. You can filter which services you wish to embed by modifying the embed URL:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/bwana?
    num=2&service=twitter“></script>


    The items in bold in the above example denote the username, the number of items and the service name respectively. This particular widget will show the last two Twitter entries for username bwana. This is powerful in that it shows the latest service entry as well as the first few FriendFeed comments. The service names can be internal (FriendFeed messages), blog, lastfm, seesmic, googlereader, and so on. To get the name of the service, go over to FriendFeed and hover over the service icon and look at the URL. This is what an embed looks like for Twitter:

    Lifestream | Bwana.org

  3. Embed your latest FriendFeed messsage text only. There are multiple ways to do this, but thanks to Benjamin Golub, I’ve found the feed supplied by the API is the easiest way. The first thing to do is to determine your FriendFeed ATOM URL from the API. It is of the format

    http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user?nickname=[YOURNICKNAME]
    &service=[SERVICE]&output=atom&num=[COUNT]


    My URL is

    http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user?nickname=bwana
    &service=internal&output=atom&num=1


    Once you have established your feed URL, use your favorite RSS/Atom plugin to embed it in your blog. For Wordpress, the RSS widget should work fine. My favorite is feedlist. With my blog, I simply put the following in my template where I wanted the update:

    <?
    feedList(array("rss_feed_url"=>"http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/
    user?nickname=bwana&service=internal&output=atom&num=1","before"=>"", "after"=>"", "ignore_cache"=>"30"));
    ?>

    I like feedlist because it gives you a great deal of control on how to handle the feed output. The resulting output looks like:

    Bwana.org

    Again, you can place this anywhere in your blog. I put it at the very top of my index page above all blog posts.

    [Update] - Magpie (which is built into Wordpress now it seems) chokes on FriendFeed entries that are shared with an image or media attached. I’m looking into finding a workaround or solution in the meantime.

  4. Add FriendFeed “comments” and “likes” to your blog posts. Unfortunately, this solution only works with Wordpress. Louis Gray and Thomas Hawk are very interested in someone writing something for Blogger. This involves installing the FriendFeed Wordpress plugin by Glenn Slaven. After installing and enabling the plugin, comments made in FriendFeed will be shown on your blog posts. Users can also directly comment to FriendFeed from your blog post. This is very powerful if you wish to combine your own blog comments with FriendFeed comments. This is what it looks like:


    Twit-Out Conversations. Join in! | Bwana.org

These are my favorite ways to enhance my Wordpress blog with FriendFeed, and I’m quite sure there are more ways to do it. What ways have you enhanced your blog with FriendFeed? Has it worked? Leave a comment here or on FriendFeed.

Related Thoughts



Follow the conversation at YackTrack!

  • May 28, 2008 at 3:23 pm Ole Begemann
    Now this would be great advice if I actually had a blog.
  • May 28, 2008 at 3:25 pm Mike Fruchter
    Bookmarked, thanks.
  • May 28, 2008 at 3:33 pm AJ Kohn
    Excellent. Thanks for the tips. I may take a run at the Wordpress Plugin.
  • May 28, 2008 at 3:40 pm Shey
    Sweet list, thanks!
  • May 28, 2008 at 3:41 pm Benjamin Golub
    Thanks for mentioning me!
  • May 28, 2008 at 3:42 pm Bwana McCall
    No problem Benjamin, you and Paul opened up a lot of possibilities
  • May 28, 2008 at 3:52 pm Benjamin Golub
    APIs are powerful things; FriendFeed (and RSSmeme) both have them and I want more people to understand that it isn't complicated to use them.
  • May 28, 2008 at 4:57 pm Bhaskar Vijay Singh
    good read though I closed my blog......via feedalizr
  • May 28, 2008 at 5:07 pm Shey
    A lot of folks including myself are intimidated when they hear "API"
  • May 28, 2008 at 6:58 pm Bwana McCall
    I never thought the RSS mechanism would work differently with the API. Ignorance I guess. I have some experience working with Twitter and Jaiku APIs and I don't think they did this. I could be wrong.
  • May 28, 2008 at 7:31 pm Jennifer Leggio
    I wish the plugin worked on WP.com blogs.
  • June 2, 2008 at 9:08 pm Jake Fudge
    I just wish there was a general solution to allow everyone to use this great plug-in. I tried having a go to get it to work on my Tumblr blog but it wasn't having any :¬( Good solid HTML widget to add to my CSS is what's needed ;¬D
  • July 7, 2008 at 3:13 pm l0ckergn0me
    Pat Hawks already had a proof of concept for Blogger, I thought?
  • July 7, 2008 at 3:22 pm klecu
    I'm working on a php script that merges Friendfeed likes and comments with Disqus comments. Still in early stages, but let me know if anyone would like to take a look (twitter klecu or comment on my blog http://klecu.com/article/disqus-friendfeed-comment-combin)
  • July 7, 2008 at 3:24 pm Bwana McCall
    When I blogged this (May 28), no Blogger solution existed.
  • July 7, 2008 at 3:29 pm Holger Eilhard
    I just went through the process of adding friendfeed to my own site (holgr.com) last week and also found your site. It's a good starting point! Unfortunately the "default" options are pretty scarce and not really flexible. Fortunately - however - the API is so simple that you can create a nice embed yourself using the documentation.
  • August 14, 2008 at 5:28 am Mike Riversdale
    Excellent list, thanks

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