FriendFeed Comments plugin
The FriendFeed Comment plugin is a WordPress plugin that lets you display the comments that have been posted for an article on FriendFeed. The comments that were written on FriendFeed, are shown along with the comments that were written on the blog itself.
In addition to letting you display the FriendFeed comments, you can also also have any comments written by the blog author on the blog itself, added to FriendFeed.
[via Zeigen]
Comments after switching to WordPress
I have notices something interesting after making the switch to WordPress. Many of my older posts are now being commented on with a higher frequency than they were with LifeType. I think that there are some potential reasons for this
- LifeType had a Bayesian spam filter. It is possible that it was trained poorly over time, so these comments were marked as spam and deleted immediately
- There could have been a bug in the other spam filters, which would have deleted those comments.
- Since I am submitting a new sitemap for the WordPress blog, the posts could see “fresher” and could appear higher in search results.
WordPress for web site
A while ago, I wanted to set up a new web site. I didn’t want to hand edit the html, as I usually do, so I decided to use Godaddy’s Website Tonight to create the web site. Website Tonight is a web based site management system where you can use GUI tools to edit the look of a web site. The tools are done in such a way where you can easily change the theme, and have it apply to all of the pages.
I have been having some problems with Website Tonight, though. There is a bug in the UserAgent handling in the editor. It doesn’t recoginze Firefox 3.x as a recent version of a browser. So I am forced to use Internet Explorer in my Windows XP virtual machine to edit the site. In addition to that, some of the widgets that they have available have some problems. For example, Godaddy makes a rss widget available to embed an rss feed in a web page. The widget doesn’t have some of the configuration options that I want. For example, I want to include the text from the rss items themselves, but I don’t want to include the text from the channel element.
I think that WordPress will work perfectly for what I want to do. I can create multiple pages in WordPress, and they will automatically appear in the navigation for the site. I can also use WordPress’s WYSIWYG editor to edit those pages. In addition, I know that WordPress doesn’t have the problem with UserAgent detection.
Since WordPress natively deals with blog items, I am sure that it will be very easy to create a page that has one category of posts.
Facebook Connect
I have decided to use Facebook Connect on this blog, instead of my previous usage of Google Friend Connect. There are a few reasons that I am making this switch.
- I was never impressed with Google Friend Connect’s social features. Google Friend Connect doesn’t have a concept of a “friend activity feed”. So there is no way to see in an aggregated list of my contact’s activities. With Facebook Connect, comment activities appear in the Facebook News Feed
- Google Friend Connect’s comment system requires Javascript, which is not compatible with all browsers. Facebook Connect, with the WordPress plugin, the comments are still process in the normally, but there just is an addition step for publishing the status item.
This page has good instructions about setting up Facebook Connect for WordPress.
Switched to Wordpress
I have just switched this blog to WordPress from LifeType. The mtexport plugin make this very easy. The main thing that the Movable Type Import Format doesn’t include is image resources. So, instead of attempting to move the images to WordPress, I just used some mod rewrite rules to redirect those requests.
First, I created an Alias in apache to the LifeType install. (I did this, so I could have access to the old LifeType installation) Then I used the following rewrite rules to redirect resource requests, and requests for the rss feeds
RewriteRule ^/gallery(.*) /archive/gallery$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^/rss.php(.*) /feed/ [L,R=301]
Unfortunately, with these rules, requests for atom feeds will now return rss feeds.
Now, I just need to pick a new theme.
mtexport plugin
I have created a new plugin, called mtexport, which will export a LifeType blog to the Movable Type Import Format file. This format is can be imported into WordPress.
The reason that I created this plugin, is because I am moving my blogs to Wordpress. I have been happy with LifeType, but but I am getting tired of added features myself. Often when I see some software that is available for other blogs, I have to port it myself. This is what I did with AddThis, Akismet, Twitter, Related articles plugin, http::BL, and reflection.
I don’t want to spend the time creating plugins for the cool new features, so I am just going to switch to WordPress where there is a large library of plugins.
Stopped using Google Friend Connect for comments
I have stopped using Google Friend Connect for blog comments. There are several things that Google could add to make this more usuable
- It should be possible to specify a home page when submitting an anonymous comment
- It should be possible to configure the wall to not truncate the messages
- It should be possible for the user to configure the what happens when a user clicks on their urls for their authenticated comment (link to Google Friend Connect profile, or blog)
- Google should, and maybe already do, process the javascript and index the page using the content of the comments. There could be a unique comment that someone leaves, and if Google doesn’t index it, people will not be able to find the comment.
Comments switched to Google Friend Connect
As I was thinking about before, I have disabled comments on this blog, and enabled Google Friend Connect for comments. I am interested in finding out how well this will work. I am still not requiring authentication for adding comments, in the hope that Google will still do spam filtering.
Blog Comments using Google Friend Connect
I am thinking about disabling comments on this blog, but also adding Google Friend Connect’s Wall gadget. This would enable:
- Offload the spam filtering from my server
- Reduce the chance of security holes, as less user input would allowed on my server
- Enable cross site conversations,
- Enable the users to archive their comments
But there are some downsides to this
- Requires a browser to have JavaScript enabled to leave a comment
- Potentially slows the page loads, as requests have to go to additional servers.
- For posts that already have comments, the comments that had been previously added will not appear the same as the new comments.
Has anyone else done this? If so, how well does it work? Or should I just stick to LifeType’s internal comments?
LoudTwitter
I have been trying to get the Google Reader items that I share and the links that I add on delicious.com, and post them to my blog once a day. I wrote a rss plugin for LifeType that would create a post with the contents of an rss feed. The problem is that I have not been able to generate a rss feed that only contains that last 24 hours of items. The problem is that the rss feed of shared items from Google Reader doesn’t include the date/time that the item was shared.
LoudTwitter is a service that will post the last 24 hours of your Twitter entries to a blog. A while ago, FriendFeed added the ability to post to Twitter. I have already configured my FriendFeed account with my Google Reader Shared item, and my delicious.com account.
Setting up LoudTwitter was pretty easy. I created a new user on my blog that LoudTwitter would use (that doesn’t have as much prividledges as my normal account. Also I can disable the account if needed.) It was able to post to my blog well.
I don’t think that I will use this service. The problem is that I want to limit the types of content that gets posted. I don’t want to post random twitter post, but I do want to include links that I post on twitter. Also, I don’t want to include links to articles on the blog that LoudTwiter is posting to. LoudTwitter does have the ability to limit content to those that include a #loudtwitter hash tag. The problem with this is that, I can’t control the text that Google Reader uses for the shared items.
I think that my ideal solution is that FriendFeed adds this functionality. I imagine that they should do something like their integration with Twitter. I should be able to select which services I would want included in the post.
