4 Ways to Enhance Your Blog With FriendFeed
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.
- 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.
You can install this in your sidebar or on a dedicated page simply by copying and pasting the code supplied in your blog template.
- 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:
- 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 ishttp://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:
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. - 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:
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.
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