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.

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 didn’t spot this myself because I don’t subscribe to my main feed in Google Reader, just the comments feed. Attensa was picking up my main feed posts just fine, and although I don’t use it much these days, the toast slices were popping up each time I posted something new so I figured everything was groovy.

After the heads-up from Paul, I tried to add the main feed to Google Reader but it told me there were no valid feeds at my URL. Yikes! I headed over to feedvalidator.org and checked both of my feed URLs. I needed to make some changes to a couple of the WordPress php files, and a change to a php module for one of the plugins that I use before the feeds would validate.

The strange thing is that the main feed still isn’t being picked up by Google Reader. By that I mean the feed title appears, but it doesn’t collect any posts. If I specify it as:

 http://andrewterry.com/?feed=rss2

it’s fine; the same if I drop the trailing slash, as in,

http://andrewterry.com/feed

The problem is I’m struggling to find out where/how WordPress constructs this URL. Even stranger is the fact that Google Reader doesn’t seem to care about the trailing slash on the comments feed, and picking up new posts there without any problem.

I’ve got a couple of queries posted elsewhere, but if anyone reading this can shed some light on this strangeness, I would love to hear from you!

[tags]Google Reader, WordPress, feeds, RSS[/tags]

I’ve changed web hosts, because GoDaddy don’t allow SSH connections, (Bluehost to the resuce!), but then found I needed to provide photo-ID to Bluehost before they would enable SSH on my hosting account. I’ve been cursing Firefox on Ubuntu for making it so difficult to install a simple plug-in. I’ve been cursing Ubuntu generally, because after installing phpmyadmin on my localhost, it point-blank refused to open.

It got to the point where I had visions of not being able to import any posts and categories and being forced to start over. Then I found this article, and figured that I could use the SQL script created by the mysqldump command and then cut and paste that script into the mySQL query window at Bluehost. As you can see, it worked!

All I need to do now is back everything up; change the pointers on my WordPress database to point to my external hostname and then upload everything to my web host.

The next time you read this, andrewterry.com will look very different! I hope you like it.

As someone who has only tinkered with the periphery of Linux in the past, this is proving to be easier said than done… I’ve built and rebuilt my Ubuntu server at least 3 times now, and have ended up hosing it because of some weird config change that I’ve made in trying to get mysql working. The problem I’ve found with much of the documentation out there is that it starts off assuming no user knowledge at all, but drops that assumption half way through. I can’t blame it all on the documentation though – I’ll bash away at something and refer back to the docs only when the system is on its knees, by which time its usually unrecoverable!

So, I’m on my fourth rebuild but this time, I’m noting down everything I’m doing so that I can go back and undo it – TiddlyWiki is great for this type of project. You never know; it might turn out to be a useful reference for other Windows admins who want to setup an Ubuntu host.

In short, the last week or so has been frustrating, time consuming, but I haven’t enjoyed myself this much for ages! I guess I’ll be sticking with Quickblog for a little while yet.