July 2, 2009
I’ve been looking for a plugin that I could use to create a lifestream page on my blog, but since Friendfeed already does a great job of aggregating my internet bread crumb trail, I thought I’d try and make use of their embeddable widget and cook one up myself.
First stop – the Tools page, which you can get to here:
Then select Embeddable Widget. The default settings for the widget have a Friendfeed logo, a border and a subscribe button, which will look out of place on a themed blog page, so we need to configure the options, like this:
and then copy the code that which gets generated into a new page on your blog (if you’re using Wordpress, you’ll need to select the HTML tab, rather than the Visual tab when you’re editing the page). You should now see something like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/yourFriendfeedName?v=3&num=10&hide_logo=1&hide_comments_likes=1&hide_subscribe=1"></script><noscript><a href="http://friendfeed.com/yourFriendfeedName"><img alt="View my FriendFeed" style="border:0;" src="http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/yourFriendfeedName?v=3&num=10&hide_logo=1&hide_comments_likes=1&hide_subscribe=1&format=png"/></a></noscript>
I’ve highlighted a couple sections in the code snippet that you can change – for my use, I changed the num= variable so the widget displays 20 items instead, and I’ve also removed the code between the <noscript> tags, too (this renders the widget as an image, for anyone running their browser with Javascript disabled).
I wanted the lifestream data to look like it was an organic part of my blog, so had to edit my stylesheet in order to make the background transparent and hide the comments and likes. In Wordpress, the stylesheet is located in the wp-content/themes/yourTheme/style.css , which is where the following additions get appended:
.friendfeed {
color:#222222;
font-family:"Lucida Grande",Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif !important;
font-size:10pt !important;
}
.friendfeed img {
border:0 none;
}
.friendfeed .header div.inner {
display: none !important;
}
.friendfeed .header img.logo {
display: none !important;
}
.friendfeed .feed {
background-color:transparent !important;
border-color:transparent !important;
}
.friendfeed .feed .entry .comments .comment {
display: none;
}
.friendfeed .feed .entry .likes {
display: none;
}
(For some reason, I had to explicitly define the font-family; the widget wouldn’t inherit from my default style sheet – if anyone can shed some light on the reason, I’d be grateful for the lesson!.)
When I was tinkering with CSS elements, I couldn’t for the life of me get the changes to apply to the page; it was rendering with Friendfeed’s default settings – despite the use of the !important tag. I was banging my head against the wall, until I read this post by Michelle McGinnis over at building43:
There is one important caveat, however: your stylesheet will be cached on the FriendFeed server, so every time you make a change you will need to change the name of the stylesheet. You can do this by adding ?v=1, ?v=2, ?v=3 etc to the end of the link.
I’ve highlighted the field Michelle is referring to in the code snippet copied from the widget generator:
<script src="http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/yourFriendfeedName?v=3&num=10&hide_logo=1&hide_comments_likes=1&hide_subscribe=1" type="text/javascript">
Once I’d updated the version number, the page rendered itself nicely – thanks Michelle; I really was tearing my hair out with that one!
So there you have it – a themed lifestream page, courtesy of Friendfeed, and I’m pleased with the result, if I do say so myself! If you do this on your blog, let me know; I’d love to hear from you.
Posted in FriendFeed, blogging, development, wordpress 
No Comments »
July 2, 2009
Yesterday, a new gadget site was launched; only, this was no ordinary gadget site.
gdgt is the new project from Peter Rojas and Ryan Block – the founder and the former Chief Editor of the mighty Engadget, respectively – and something that has been hotly antipicated (at least within the gadget news world, which I like to inhabit) for a year now, so the launch was big news.
The site is great and is going to attract a ton of traffic, but what struck me most, was this article on Engadget, which closes with:
Look, we’ve found the best way in life to learn about something is to scuttle the user manual and dive right in — we highly suggest you do the same and take gdgt out for a spin. We think you’ll like what you find.
Congrats Peter and Ryan!
I know there’s a lot of history between Ryan, Peter and Engadget, but the hard fact is that Engadget and gdgt operate within the same crowded and very competitive market. Yet here we have Joshua Topolsky saying to his readers, “go and check out the competition; we think you’ll like it“.
OK; it’s not all rosy in the new media garden, but I can’t imagine, for example, the Telegraph newspaper saying to it’s readers, “The Guardian have launched a new tech news site, with content from some awesome writers; go check it out!”, can you?
Posted in gadgets, news No Comments »
June 27, 2009
I love Twitter; honestly, I do; but the lack of an Edit function is really starting to piss me off.
Like most of the internet on Thursday night (UK time), I was following the news of Michael Jackson’s shocking and untimely death. One of the first substantive articles I came across was on the LA Times blog, reporting that the star had been taken to hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest.
I shortened the URL using bit.ly, and Twittered the following:
Even as my finger was hitting the Return key, my subconscious spell-checker was shouting a warning, but too late.
It seems that I wasn’t alone:
…the trending topics list on Twitter is a rotating set of call-outs to the late King of Pop. At first it was shocking to see how many people are capable of operating Twitter, but not spelling “Michael” correctly.
Over on my Friendfeed, however, it was a different matter. My Tweets get cross-posted there, but Friendfeed allows me to edit anything I post into my stream:
See the difference? Here we have the “same” post from Twitter, but edited to correct my stupid spelling mistake.
Like Friendfeed, Twitter is, at heart, an online publishing tool, so the ability to edit a post after publication is basic functionality, and something that Twitter has been lacking for too long now.
Posted in Twitter, microblogging No Comments »
June 3, 2009
The internet is an amazing thing; it’s a fantastic resource for obtaining and sharing knowledge; a platform that heralds the end of the Industrial Age transportation of products that can be distributed more easily and with less environmental impact as a bitstream. Reducing the need for physical media, packaging, delivery vehicles and logistical infrastructure means that cost of sale to the customer can also be reduced. Simple. Right?
I visited the Adobe website today to purchase a copy of Lightroom.
So, that’s £228.85. When you add shipping (and VAT) it comes out at £234.72. Not cheap when compared to something like Aperture, but Lightroom is highly recommended by a number of pro photographers, not least of whom is my younger brother, Chris.
Wanting the instant gratification that only the internet can bring and expecting a digital download to cost less, I hit the drop down next to “Delivery Method” and saw the price adjust accordingly:
Wait… What?
It’s cheaper to have a physical product boxed, put in a vehicle and shipped to my door than it is to download a file to my computer? Thinking I must be missing something obvious, I followed the link to the FAQ:
According to the FAQ, I can “Skip the shipping and save money”. Hmmm….
I realise the price difference is a small one, but that difference should be in favour of a digital download.
So what do you think? Is this an admin error, or have Adobe put a price on the “got to have it now” mentality of the internet shopper?
Posted in software No Comments »
March 30, 2008
As I was trawling through this morning’s updates in my FriendFeed, I came across an interesting post from Loic Le Meur saying that while his blog used to be the central point for his online presence, using services like Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, Dopplr, etc has fragmented that presence.
He goes on to point out that, while FriendFeed does a fine job of bringing all of that data together, it would be better to have that data on his blog, rather than just at FriendFeed.
I commented on Loic’s post to say that while FriendFeed is a destination today, the development of their API will turn it into a data source tomorrow. I’m already starting to see this happen – FriendFeed has made my Plaxo Pulse redundant (although Plaxo still does a better job than anyone synchronising my calendars); the same is largely true of my Facebook mini-feed where I used to have Twitter, Google Reader (via Feedheads), Flickr, Last.fm etc, all posting updates to my mini-feed via their Facebook applications – now I don’t need to; the FriendFeed application does it all instead.
If we take that over to the Loic’s centralised online presence – his blog-, he’ll still have to trust the aggregation task to FriendFeed, but he can get his aggregated data feed back out, via the API, and recentralise it how he wants.
Which brings us to a part of the data portability debate that has been largely overlooked and that is “it’s my data, I want to use it where and how I like”. In this post on TechCrunch, Mike Arrington suggests that DataPortability is somehow a threat to FriendFeed, but I’m not sure that’s the case. Ok, so FriendFeed isn’t about getting social networks to explicitly talk to each other, but unlike Facebook, which is quite happy to let data in while not letting it back out, FriendFeed feeds and comments are available to anyone with a bit of “mad coding skillz“.
If I can feed the same data stream into my blog, into my Facebook or wherever, then isn’t it this early openness that puts FriendFeed ahead of the game? One feed to rule them all in the webness bind them… (I’m sorry; it’s awful, I know, but I couldn’t resist).
Posted in FriendFeed, blogging, development 1 Comment »
March 25, 2008
Over the weekend, I did a couple of things that I don’t normally do – I bought a newspaper and I watched TV.
I was spending the weekend in the North East of England with friends; Mrs T was already in that neck of the woods because of some work stuff, so I cadged a lift with the friends that we’d be spending the weekend with. I can’t remember the last time I actually bought a newspaper, but thought I’d take full advantage of being driven around, and bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph to read along the way.
As I flicked through the pages, I realised I wasn’t actually reading any of the stories because pretty much everything I was looking at in today’s paper had already been covered in yesterday’s news feeds and blog posts. Oh well, at least the crossword kept me busy for an hour or so.
(Before I describe my next collision with old-media, I should point out that I don’t have TV, and haven’t had TV for about 4 years. I have a wall-screen for the Xbox360 and DVD player but don’t have a tuner or satellite dish for broadcast TV. As a result, watching TV is used to be something of a novelty)
In the evening, we had a couple of hours to kill in the hotel room before going out, so I switched on the TV. Being a Bank Holiday Friday, I was expecting to be overwhelmed with a choice of televisual treats, but instead I got game show (BBC1), game show (BBC2), game show (ITV), a repeat episode of The Simpsons (C4) and Airplane (Five) (yes, the almost-30-year-old-funny-the-first-time-not-so-much-now spoof about a chaotic plane journey). I didn’t even bother trying any of the satellite channels, opting, instead to grab my iPod and watch a couple of episodes of Mahalo Daily and Unwired, followed by a topping of Diggnation.
These two experiences got me thinking – the oldspaper distribution (I’m sorry – I just can’t bring myself to call them newspapers any more) model is doomed. There will always be an outlet for good journalistic writing, but it won’t be the printed daily paper. It might be a Kindle-esque model, like that adopted by the New York Times and the WSJ, but even then, it’s still akin to pushing a day-old square peg into an online, immediate round hole.
As for broadcast TV, based on Friday evening’s offerings, it appears to be doing a great job of screwing itself. I don’t know many qualifications it takes to be a TV schedule programmer, but it clearly doesn’t take any effort.
So there I was, an ABC1 demo, at prime viewing time a on a Friday evening – oldspaper consigned to the dustbin, unread; TV switched off; choosing, instead, to watch independently produced media on my iPod.
And why? Because old media isn’t providing me with any compelling reasons to stick around.
Posted in media No Comments »
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