FriendFeed Activity Widget Released

10AM on Sunday, April 6th, 2008

FriendFeed Activity Widget Released

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The FriendFeed Activity Widget is a simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog. It’s essentially a lifestream plugin that requires just a few steps to set up.

Give it a look.

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Filed under Projects. Tagged with extension, friendfeed, plugin, wordpress.

Evan Sims
evansims.com
August 5, 2008 at 7:27 pm

Hey Sephrym, the next version of the plugin should do precisely what you're looking for. I'm trying out some new techniques in my latest plugins that I'll be applying to the next FriendFeed Activity version, and one of those is multi-user support. Stay stuned to the blog for an announcement when that goes live. Thanks!

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Saphrym
saphrym.com
August 5, 2008 at 5:09 pm

Evan,

I am creating a blog for some friends and would like to be able to use more than one FriendFeed widget. How could I do that? Basically it's a dual author blog and they want both sets of feeds. The current plugin only allows for one. Could you make it do multiple? Or is there a way I can make it do more than one widget?

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
August 3, 2008 at 10:15 am

Thanks, castaway. Unfortunately that functionality beyond is the scope of this plugin.

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islandcastaway
August 3, 2008 at 10:11 am

excellent plugin, BUT i really really need it to actually “make a blog post” with the info, not just stream an rss.

the main thing im after is to get the “just added youtube fav” and ” just dugg a story on digg ” from friendfeed to make a blog post in wordpress.

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
August 2, 2008 at 9:32 pm

Yup, I have considered building something like that, but it's probably a bit outside the scope of this particular plugin. Even so, it's an idea I plan on toying with as a separate plugin in the near future. Keep an eye on my blog for updates on that.

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onkelandy
August 2, 2008 at 5:19 am

O I C.. thanks for the info! By the way.. do you plan to implement a function to put the lifestream on a page? Something like the plugins http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simplelife/ or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/ do? Would be cool to have the x most recent entries in the sidebar and a complete log on an extra page.. ;)

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
August 1, 2008 at 9:24 pm

Grouping should always work, except for Twitter, unless i haven't added formatting for that service yet. if you have any other services that aren't getting grouped or formatted properly let me know and I'll be sure to get those in.

FriendFeed unfortunately does not output it's grouped format from the API, so much of the work the widget does it formatting things and making them look more or less along the lines of what you'd see on FriendFeed. It's unfortunate they don't offer an API hook for fetching things just as you'd see them on their site.

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onkelandy
August 1, 2008 at 7:46 pm

Thanks for your fast response. As I said the grouping sometimes works and that's brilliant. I was just wondering why the twitter-messages got posted seperately although they already were combined by Friendfeed (which is also nice.. ;)) So a 1:1 update from friendfeed would be enough for that…

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
August 1, 2008 at 4:57 pm

Hey Andy, the plugin doesn't group twitter postings on purpose, actually. It was a design decision I made early on in building the plugin. I might add an option to group those later on.

The icons are actually provided by and pulled from FriendFeed. You could override them using CSS. For example, div.ff-twitter { background-image: url(path/to/your/icon'); }

Thanks!

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onkelandy
August 1, 2008 at 4:50 pm

Hi Evan! Thanks for the cool plugin. It has some issues though with combined activities. On friendfeed it says: “posted two messages on twitter” but your plugin splits the two entries. Interesting enough your plugin combines other activities like google-reader-additions correctly.. Can you take a look into that?

By the way.. the twitter-icon sucks so big because of that white halo-stuff.. Would be cool if you could integrate an own clean one.. i an provide you a fine png.

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
July 29, 2008 at 10:02 am

Are you using PHP5?

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Roam2Rome
roam2rome.com
July 29, 2008 at 2:30 am

Hi Evan,

Wohoo! Got the icons to show up.

Yes, it's my theme. I don't use sidebar widgets. Instead, I enter the PHP code directly to make each one unique.

Since I pulled the first post outside the loop to style the latest post differently from the old posts, then I added a call for a dynamic sidebar after the first post, and this is where I added your plugin.

It's up and running though the date is stuck… even though it does update the feed, the date is stuck on last week. Any ideas what I did wrong?

Like others here, I also look forward to the “friendfeed_activity()” call. This is my favorite plugin. Thanks!

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
July 26, 2008 at 3:17 pm

Hey Anon, can you give me the URI of the blog you're trying this on? It sounds like your theme is interfering with the Widget output somehow.

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Anon
July 26, 2008 at 3:07 pm

Yea. I spent hours working on this, but still can't get the icons to show up. YouTube shows up waaaay on top, FriendFeed at the bottom, and the rest just disappear. Any tips on what to do? I'll keep trying.

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
July 26, 2008 at 10:46 am

Glad you got it working, Erik! Let me know if I can be of any further help.

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
July 26, 2008 at 10:45 am

Sorry shokk, I've never tried the widget in a PHP4 environment. I honestly have no idea what would need to be changed to make it work. I know the PHP team did some major reworking of the timezone support in PHP5, which is probably the problem you're seeing. Not sure specifically what they changed though.

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shokk
shokk.com
July 26, 2008 at 8:12 am

I'm running PHP4 with CURL and the dates don't work for me in the WordPress FriendFeed Activity Widget. Any idea what date functions have changed between PHP4 and PHP5? Anything else I do that handles feed dates in PHP4 works correctly.

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Erik M Jacobs
erikjacobs.com
July 26, 2008 at 7:38 am

Evan,
I ended up modifying the php code because for some reason I had a mental moment and forgot you could force image sizes through CSS. I'll go back and change that now.

Thanks for this great widget.

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Anon
July 26, 2008 at 4:50 am

The plugin works beautifully, except the icons don't show up, except FriendFeed's at the bottom. Not sure what to do to fix this.

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Evan Sims
evansims.com
July 25, 2008 at 10:01 pm

Hey Thoraxe,

You can control image sizes by adding rules to your theme's CSS. My site, for example, locks image sizes to a maximum width of 55px. Modern browsers will scale images proportionally if you define one dimension and not the other, so it works out well. Here's the CSS I use:

#ff-activity img { width: 55px; margin: 0 5px 5px 0; }

Feel free to try that on your site, and let me know how it works out.

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Evan Sims

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FriendFeed Activity Widget Released