Monday, May 19, 2008
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FriendFeed Comments and Yahoo Pipes In my rush to get something out over the weekend, I took a few programming mashup shortcuts.
Now, while I'm troubleshooting the fact that nothing is working today on Rizzn.com with the FriendFeed API how it worked on Saturday, I'm coming to regret a few of my decisions.
First of all, as I said before, Magpie RSS is great for a lot of things (it has been the backbone of a ton of neat little rapidly developed PHP apps that deal with RSS), the nested nature of the XML created by FriendFeed is just too much for it to handle, making it necessary for a ton of crazy work-arounds.
One of those work-arounds was another shortcut I took, Yahoo! Pipes. I created some Pipes to extract out comments for just my comment stream, and comments from just me on my comment stream. It would appear that there are some weird rate limitings going on, and I can't tell if it's the fault of Pipes or FriendFeed, given its black-box nature. Sometimes the RSS feed shows up, and sometimes it just disappears (if you hit reload on the Pipes RSS feed about 10 times, it'll show up half the time, and half the time it won't).
I've created some caching subroutines that wouldn't ordinarily be necessary to make sure it'll catch all the comments, but in the next iteration of this, I'm going to have to ditch (or heavily modify) Magpie to make it work for this application, as well as recode the Pipes functionality as actual PHP. This will take me a little longer than I'd like, but it will ultimately be a much more stable application.
That's the update as of now. Off to work with me.
By the way, on a separate note, pay attention to Mashable Conversations this week - a lot of really cool interviews coming up.
Labels: friendfeed, magpie rss, rss, yahoo pipes
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 4:31 PM[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Regarding FriendFeed Integration I discussed a bit about what I was doing with the blog/site here in regards to FriendFeed on tonight's Elite Tech News broadcast.
Unfortunately, I'm looking through the entries on the front page now, and either due to caching errors or due to coding errors, a lot of conversations are showing up empty when they in fact are not. Sorry then, if you came to check out the wonder and beauty of a weekend's programming, and all you got was a bunch of nothing.
I can't promise exactly when it'll be all patched up, because the whole rat race at Mashable begins bright and early for me tomorrow morning, but in my spare moments this week, I'll be working on fixing things. My biggest problem is that I'm using MagpieRSS for my feed reading. While I love Magpie for most things, the FriendFeed feeds seem a bit too complex for it to handle, and I may need to graduate to a more complex RSS feed library.
If you have any suggestions - well, the comments aren't working here yet - so leave a message on the FeedBurner Feed that will inevitably be generated by this entry (or, alternatively, email me at guesswho@rizzn.com).
Labels: friendfeed, state of the blog
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 3:29 AM Sunday, May 18, 2008[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Excuse the Dust My site (rizzn.com, for those of you viewing this somewhere else), is undergoing some major changes. Robert Scoble, a few days ago, was talking about his diminished influence via his blog somewhere (probably FriendFeed).
That got me to thinking of the value of my personal domain simply displaying only my blog content and a list of headlines of what I write at Mashable. My personal influence is distributed all over the place. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, Mashable, Google Reader, and FriendFeed, in no particular order.
I suppose I could throw up a bunch of widgets here on the site and be done with it, but what I'd rather have is an integrated experience.
What I'm trying to create here at Rizzn.com, essentially, is a showcase for what I do everywhere. FriendFeed's API is going to be a central piece to all of this, since it's where I think the conversation is moving to for my circle of friends, but also because it aggregates everything I do elsewhere.
You'll see my FriendFeed, er, feed, along with what I say on these various items very prominently listed on the front page.
Within the next few days, you'll also see FriendFeed become the way I power my comments system. Goodbye Disqus (not that I didn't like you, I just like FriendFeed better!), and definitely goodbye Blogger comments.
And yes, I'll be making this available as a service or product or something soon. Stay tuned here.
Labels: comments, digg, disqus, friendfeed, reddit, robert scoble, twitter
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 12:01 AM
