Adding Friend Feed comments to Drupal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/22/2008 - 08:50
Last night, Bill Anderson added a Friend Feed comment on my Feed graph in Flickr.
Whoa! This is an engineering diagram that *is* a picture. What kind of systems are we building? The kind that Aldon has drawn here
What kind of systems are we building? Who is thinking about how all the moving pieces fit together? It is a very interesting line of thought to be following.
It led me to a different question. Are people adding comments to my friend feed that I, and others are missing? Have people commented on Orient Lodge blog posts over in Friend Feed?
At the same time I noticed that Friend Feed evangelist Steve Rubel posted a link: NEW FriendFeed Comment Widget (Blogger, Tumblr and FeedBurner).
It got me thinking. Can I add Friend Feed comments to Drupal? My first pass was to try and tweak some of the code in the article that Rubel linked to. That didn't work particularly well. So, I checked around on Drupal and found an example in this blog post
Doing a little tweaking, I came up with:
function friendfeedcomments(json) {
if (json.count > 0) {
var ffsection = "<div class='subheadlg' style='padding-top:15px;padding-bottom:10px;'>FriendFeed Comments:</div>"
for (var i = 0; i < json.count; ++i) {
var ffcomment = json.value.items[i];
ffsection = ffsection + "<dt class='comment-author friendfeed-comment-icon'><a href='" + ffcomment.link + "'>" + ffcomment.title + "</a>"
ffsection = ffsection + " says...</dt><dd class='comment-body'><p>" + ffcomment.description + "</p></dd>"
}
document.write(ffsection);
}
}
</script>
<script src='http://pipes.yahoo.com/pathawks/ffcomments?_callback=friendfeedcomments&_render=json&ffid=ahynes1&url=<?php print url($node_url,NULL,NULL,TRUE) ?>'>
</script>
which I added to my node.tpl.php file. Note: ahynes1 is my id on FriendFeed. If you lift this code, you should change ahynes1 to be whatever your FriendFeed id is, or you probably won't find any comments.
It looks like it is working. What would be really nice would be if I could add a link to the FriendFeed item even if there are no comments there, so that people could add comments on FriendFeed if they wanted to. That will wait for another round of tests.
about comments all over the place
Submitted by http://tishgrie... on Sun, 06/22/2008 - 10:01.Hi Aldon,
there's been a number of posts, all over bunches of nooks and crannies in the blogosphere, about the disconnect of comments from the original source. The people who feel this is ok believe it's fine for the author not to know and that the conversations are a stand-alone kind of 'sphere ("the commentsphere.")
There's been counter-conversations that state that comments are important to the author, who wants the feedback, and wants to know what people are saying. The pro-commentsphere people don't seem to care about this, and believe that comments are about their social networking lives and the author of the post is secondary to their needs.
Honestly, I find this somewhat disturbing. I originally started blogging to get feedback from people. Now, because one group has found a tool that amuses them--and it amuses them to have their own conversation without me--I may not know what other people think of my work. I also don't get any "juice" or links from these conversations. So, I may, over time, be unable to even connect with folks who like what I've written because I can't find the conversations.
I don't know if the answer is better aggregating technology or something else.
Comments Everywhere
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/22/2008 - 10:44.I think you hit the underlying issue pretty well. My gut feeling right now is that I don't feel too badly about comments everywhere, as long as they link back to the original discussion and the original discussion has someway of linking to them. In the old days, trackbacks were part of this.
So, I'm pleased that I can get FriendFeed comments displayed here and will look for other ways of connecting better with the commentosphere.