Blogging your social web activity

[Dan Grossman]

On the rare occasions as of late that I have free time, I've started writing a WordPress plugin to bring your 'web 2.0' social activity to your blog.

It'd make note of your activity on other sites, and either create a list for your sidebar, or create new blog posts altogether with the updates. It's inspired by the flurry of updates you see in Facebook mini-feeds thanks to all the new applications people are using. For example, it could record:

- You bookmark a site with del.icio.us
- You positively rate a site on Stumbleupon
- You upload a new photo to Flickr
- You add an update on Twitter

I'm looking for a little feedback. Does this seem like an interesting idea? Would it be better as some kind of sidebar block, or should it create new blog posts whenever it sees activity? What other services should it track (keeping in mind they should be interesting to readers of a blog, not just the authors)?

I know there are individual plugins available to throw most of these things in a sidebar in some shape or form. But I like writing things myself, and I want them all in one plugin, not 10. :)

[Jeremy]

I think a sidebar block would be best. Not something appropriate for my site, but I think it is a fantastic idea in general.

[ses5909]

Sounds like a great plugin Dan! I do think it would be better to have it in your sidebar rather than start a new post. I see some people who any time they digg a story, it creates a new post. Now while that may keep their blog looking fresh and updated, i NEVER click on those. I'm there to read their stuff not what they dugg.

Now if it was in a sidebar OR something they could put somewhere in their blog template, I may keep my eye on it. It's another way to get to know that person.

I would recommend giving the user the option to turn on and off certain sites. I just installed the Submit It plugin to my site and it had all of these places it would give your users the option to submit to. I didn't want all of that in mine so I deleted what I didn't want from the plugin itself and manually added what I did want in. It would have been a better idea for them to give me the option in my admin to choose what I wanted.

[Dan Grossman]

Still working out the details on how to make this useful. I want it for my own blog, if other people want to use it, great. I need to add some customization options and date formats/date headers...

I think this may work well as its own page. A little testing...

http://www.dangrossman.info/photos/screenshots/activitystream.jpg

It polls the feeds/APIs for updates on load if it's been >30 minutes since the last check, so except a single page load every 30 minutes being slow while it checks for updates, it isn't very resource intensive and shouldn't slow down the blog at all.

Flickr turns out to be a pain since you can't work with usernames, you need to find their internal ID for the user...

[Jelena]

I like the idea. Can you make it so that you can actually choose if you'd like it on sidebar or new post? Also, it would be good to put a limit on items posted. Maybe it should create a page or something, so on sidebar it shows latest 10, and you could click on More link to view all items?

[ses5909]

Looking good so far. But yes, it's a lot for a sidebar. Perhaps you can offer a function:

<?php get_last_updates(10); ?>

that would return the last 10(variable) actions and as Jelena suggested, if you clicked it could show more.

That way someone can choose whether to put it in their sidebar, or maybe in their header (similar to how I have the random question on ilovecode)

[smittenbite]

you should probably do a wholeeeee crap load of different sites, then let the user pick from the options>your_plugin_name tab which ones they want, sort of like how the widget Social does it

[Dan Grossman]

It supported all that off the bat ;) I wish I still had a PHP4 box somewhere...

[Dan Grossman]

Coming along nicely...

http://www.dangrossman.info/photos/screenshots/activitystream2.jpg