DISQUS

Great stuff, thanks! Cherokee looks really promising. I'll have to give this a try.

That's brilliant, Colin! Yet another reason to push me towards getting an iPhone, eh? =)

Good episode! I hadn't seen WPTouch before- going to have to give that a try. Thanks!

Evan Simss last blog post..Renovating Our New Place

Yeah, they've had that since the Apple.com redesign quite awhile back. I agree though, Apple manages to come up with these great, innovative user experiences that really seem to stick with you.

Gotcha, Travell. That's cool, I'm glad my widget could serve as a basis for your project. Just remember to follow the rules of the GPL! ;) The next version my widget will also have the stylesheets removed in favor of a CSS, thanks to some work by Nathan Chase.

Honestly I'm not sure what I could provide in terms of building a library that the FriendFeed wrapper doesn't do on it's own. It's very easy to adapt it to whatever situation you need. They did a great job with it.

Thanks for the comments, Travell!

Leandro, you can configure the friendfeed_activity() method by passing an array of options. I don't intend on exposing the options through the WordPress UI other than the Widgets interface.

@Leandro - Thanks; friendfeed_activity() achieves this, but is a bit buggy at the moment. The next release should fix that functionality.

@Travell - Thanks, but I'm not sure I follow what you mean. You hacked my widget to ... eh? Or are you saying you built your own? The next version of the widget has a different rendering method, though it follows the same fundamental approach. It offers a lot of customization on a per-service basis, which is what I wanted.

Mack: Not sure why that would happen. It works properly on all the installations I've tried it in. Perhaps it's another IIS issue.

Mack: The check works with strpos() in that it only checks if @ is the first character, which is common if you are replying to a tweet. stristr() would check the entire message for words beginning with @, which isn't the intention of the feature. :)

Ahhh, good finds there Mack. I'll see if I can integrate some OS checks into the next version, and I've added CURL to the requirements listed here on the page. Thanks!

Hmmm... is there a cache.dat file in your /friendfeed-activity/ folder? If so, is the file larger than 0KB? Also, can you tell me what other plugins you have installed? Perhaps there is an incompatibility with something else.

Hi Mack,

Strange... could you check if your /friendfeed-activity/ folder is CHMOD 777? It's possibly a permissions issue.

@Shannon The CSS is currently embedded in the output of the Widget. You can override it in your own stylesheet by using !important tags. For example, #friendfeed-activity { list-style: none !important; } will turn off the list appearance of the widget. That said, there is nothing in the embedded CSS that defines the width of the widget, so my guess is your theme has something strange going on with it. You could try surrounding the widget with <div></div> tags to better encapsulate the content, or specify a widget value in the CSS.

@Josh Thanks. You're quite right, FriendFeed does have a JavaScript widget. The problem with widgets that aren't hosted on your site is they rely on the hosting site to be up and working for that widget to work, otherwise your site will hang or break for visitors. Twitter taught me this quite some time ago; if you use their JavaScript embed and use, for example, other JavaScript that relies on an OnLoad event, your whole site will hang with they go down. Which seems to happen every other hour these days. Widgets like mine resolve this issue by removing the dependency on external services. :)

@Lee Thanks for the great report. I believe I know where the problem lies now, and will see about getting it fixed for the new release.

@Jandy It appears Lee has identified the problem; I'll try and get this resolved in the next release for you both. Thanks

@John - Thanks! It sounds like something has gone wrong with the dating system, either in the FriendFeed API class or in my own plugin. If you would, pop your cache file (form your friendfeed-activity) folder to me so I can debug that further and let you know where the problem lies. My email address is in the footer of this page.

@Jan Amazon thumbnails should make it into the next version.

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for your comment. You should be able to add the same output the widget produces anywhere in your templates by using the friendfeed_activity() function. I added the function in 1.0 but have not had a chance to test it thoroughly, so please let me know if you have any problems with it.

@Akhmad Nah, shouldn't be any security issues with leaving the directory with write permissions. I don't cache it to the database to reduce the number of MySQL calls; local file cache is much faster than storing to the DB.

@Kevin Thanks! You might need to add a line of CSS like this: #friendfeed-activity li { display: list-item; }; it appears your theme changes the traditional behavior of lists in your sidebar.

Fantastic, Robert! Loving the new look.

No problem, Adam.

For most things I'd certainly say I think it's as simple as Viddler.com, perhaps in some cases even more so. Commenting is easy, uploading and recording is fairly idiot-proof. However, as you might expect, the Facebook app doesn't have the full Viddler experience. There's no way to explore the complete Viddler community- your limited to just your friends from within the Facebook UI. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so, really.

You might even go so far as to think of the Facebook app as a sort of filter, letting you focus on just your closer or real world friends and their videos. More importantly though, I think they went the right route with keeping it all simple and very direct; that's the key to a get Facebook app experience.

Just to update everyone: This appears to be an issue that is, reportedly, resolved in WordPress 2.5.1. Let me know if you encounter it still. Thanks!

I've got a draft API up; let me know what you think

Thanks for the thoughts, Steve! I have an API in the works, and will hopefully have it available tonight or tomorrow (depending on how much work I get done in the office today.) I see you added me on Twitter, so I'll pop you a message there when I have it ready.

P.S. Japan? I'm so jealous. :)

Hi Renaud; thanks! Are you using PHP5? I've gotten a couple of reports of this issue, but I have not been able to reproduce it myself... one individual solved the issue after realizing they were running PHP4, but that doesn't appear to be the solution for everyone.