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&amp;num=10&amp;hide_logo=1&amp;hide_comments_likes=1&amp;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&amp;num=10&amp;hide_logo=1&amp;hide_comments_likes=1&amp;hide_subscribe=1&amp;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.

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.

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).

At first, I thought I had simply clicked through on a previous screen without deselecting the two options I didn’t want, so I cancelled the install and started again. Same result – at no point was I asked if I want to deselect these optional extras, which means you can’t install Live Writer on its own.

The system requirements for Live Writer make no mention of Sign-In Assistant and Messenger being required components, so I can’t understand why they’re not optional. There’s no good reason I can think of for a legitimate application vendor to install stuff on my computer that I don’t want or need, and Microsoft really should know better.

Equally annoying (but, at least de-selectable) the 4 boxes for Mail, Toolbar, Photo Gallery and Family Safety are checked by default.

The new release does have some new features, like the ability to insert video and preview within a Live Writer dialogue:

Also included in this release is support for printing, which is a bit of a puzzle to me, but I guess someone might need to print out their blog posts, as well actually post them.

After going for so long without an update, it’s good to see another release (and not just a bug-fix, too,) so soon after the last one. Live Writer is easy to set up, easy to use and is still my blogging tool of choice. And, despite my mini-rant just now, I would highly recommend you check it out, if you haven’t already.

Hat-tip to Springnet, for the heads-up via Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Live Writer, tools, blog, writing, utilities

So, first things first – out with the old and in with the new. It was a tough decision to ditch the Cordobo theme, which I’ve used since moving this blog over to WordPress, but I needed to do something positive to get myself back in the driving seat. I spent what felt like an age looking something fresh, light and clean and, after filtering out the search results for “ladies unmentionables”, I came across this theme by Adam Walker Cleaveland, which immediately pressed all the right buttons for me.

For the header image, I’ve used a picture that I took at the harbour in Nantucket while waiting for the ferry back to Hyannis, which I then cropped and flipped. I’m not sure about the font for the header text, though; it feels a little too clunky. Perhaps I need to add it directly to the image and use something with less weight? For the favicon, I cropped the header image still further, and used HTMLKit’s favicon service.

To display my Twitters in the sidebar, I’ve used Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin; I also use another of Alex’s plugins – Share This – which provides an elegant and unobtrusive way for readers to add a post to a number of social networking/bookmarking sites.

I’m far from finished though; there are still some further tweaks that I will make over the coming days:

I need to revise and consolidate my categories.

When I started this blog, I didn’t take the time to understand the difference between categories, keywords and tags (oh, my!); consequently I have a bunch of random/orphaned categories that need tidying up. I figure I can use a SQL query to rename them, but I wonder how that affects incoming links and indexes?

The categories list is dull.

The alphabetical list of categories isn’t as engaging as the tag-cloud I used to have; that needs to be put right.

I need to fix the sidebar and footer presentation on the static pages.

If you take a look at my Link Blog or Contact Me pages, you’ll see that the side bars and footer aren’t being rendered.

I want to change the sidebar widgets that present the RSS Feeds.

The default on the widgets doesn’t include the RSS icon; a small thing, I know, but it’s a daft omission.

I need to change the Search function.

I felt that the Search box provided by the theme interfered too much with the header image; on the other hand, the WordPress-provided Search widget is too “blah”. I need something that fits better with the crispness of the theme.

The presentation of the Technorati tags needs changing.

Like the Search box, the way these are presented now looks like an afterthought.

I’ve listed these things here because I remember reading a blog post some weeks back about publishing stuff that you want to get done; once it’s out there, it’s harder to procrastinate and put them off. (If anyone can help me out with that link, I’ll update this post.)

So, here’s the new look at andrewterry.com - this will be the catalyst for me writing about things other than tech stuff; stuff I want to get off my chest; stuff that I can share; stuff that I hope more people can engage with.

How do you like it?

I use Splashblog on my Windows Smartphone, but the mobile client started out as a Palm application and so the news of Splashblog’s passing has, for once, united Palm and Windows Mobile users who are equally sad to see the end of such a great service.

So, where now for mobile photoblogging? I keep a few photos online at Sharpcast, because the client app makes uploading and synching a) as easy as pie and b) slicker than Flickr (fancy a new tagline, Sharpcast?). Sharpcast have released a mobile client, but I haven’t played with it yet. With Splashblog closing down, I guess that’s the obvious choice.

What do you use for moblogging?