Tag Archives: social

WP-Twitter-ID Social Profiles Integration

wordpress, , , , , ,

A few days ago I wrote a post about a wordpress plugin that will add a twitter id field to the comments form and I was reporint two problems with it. One was solved in that post and for the second one I'm going to show you a solution in this post.

The Problem

The second problem was that the twitter id field was show assigned to a comment when a registered user was commenting.

Basically I needed a way to specify the twitter id of a registered user in the profile and then just make the WP-twitip-id plugin use that value form the profile. I could have done this by implementing the necessary code to show the field on the profile page and save it's value when the profile was saved but I was lazy and I wanted a quicker solution.

The Quick Solution

The quick solution was to install the Social Profiles plugin, set my twitter id in my profile and then do a simple modification to wp-twitip-id.

To make the modification just open wp-twitip-id.php in any editor, look for "function addtwitterfieldmeta($comment_data){" and right after that line insert the following code:

  1. span style="color: #ff0000;">'atf_twitter_id''atf_twitter_id''cyc2_twitter');
  2. }

That's it. Simple don't you think ? Now next time you post a comment as a registered user you should see your twitter id in the comment header.

Download

Here's the zip file with all modifications including the one in the previous post.

[download#1]

Getting Social: Google Friend Connect

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Lately I have become more involved into social media/networking. I'm far from a social media expert, and I think too many people declare themselves social media gurus. If everybody's a guru no one's a guru anymore :).

Anyway as part of my social networking involvement I try to experiment with new things as time permits. One of these things is Google Friend Connect.

What is Google Friend Connect?

In a few words it's a service that allows a site's visitors to connect with their friends that might also use the same site.

Google provides a few gadgets, one for showing members, another one for allowing members to post on your site's wall, a Review/Rate gadget and some others supporting the OpenSocial platform but developers can build their own gadgets too.

It allows you to see who else is using the same site as you are and what other sites are your friends using. You can connect with your friends on twitter, plaxo, google ( gmail) and orkut but other networks may be available in the future. So if you're visiting my blog and using one of those services you might want to become a member of this site and see what you're friends are doing.

How to implement on your blog?

If you want to implement Google Friend Connect on your blog, the process is pretty simple just go to http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ , click the "Setup a new site" button and follow the simple instructions.

It will ask you to provide the site name and home page url and then will provide 2 html files for download that you have to upload to your site.

I had troubles downloading the html files because they didn't actually contain any html but just javascript and firefox would interpret them and save them as empty files. If you have the same problem, get Firebug and look into the Net tab after you download the files. You should see the html response for each of those files and just copy paste into the files and upload that to your site.

Then pick one of more gadgets, customize them to match the look of your site and google will generate some html code that you can copy and put where ever you want on your site.

Let's connect!

You can see the google friend connect members gadget on the right sidebar after the "Recent comments" widget. Just click the "Join" button.

Other places where we can connect:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/mihaisecasiu

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Mihai-Secasiu/566029300

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mihaisecasiu

FriendFeed: https://friendfeed.com/mihaisecasiu

Stubleupon: http://symx.stumbleupon.com/

Digg: http://digg.com/users/symx

Scour: The socially search engine

Web,

I just started using Scour, a search engine that let's you vote and comment on the results.

Scour queries the top 3 major search engines: Google, yahoo and live to provide results so it's like using your preferred search engine with a social twist. You can vote up or down each result and comment on it and then scour uses this data ( votes , comments ) to provide better  relevancy.

The problem is that when people want to search they want results quick and once they get them they just leave so in order to encourage users to contribute scour rewards them with points that can be converted in money using visa gift cards.

The idea is that since the major search engines are making billions from search the user should get something ( more then just search results ) out of it too.

Once you signed up to scour you can start using it for your daily search just like you did with google, yahoo or msn . They even have a search bar plugin for internet explorer and firefox  and in the faqs you can find instructions about how you can make firefox use it as the default search engine instead of google. There is also a toolbar but apparently it's only for internet explorer or only for windows ( .exe ) .

As you keep searching, voting, commenting you accumulate points. For each search you get 1 point, for each vote you get 2 points and for each comment you get 3 points but a maximum of 4 points / search  and once you reach 6500 points you get a $25 visa gift card.

I like Scour both for the ideas of higher relevancy through votes and comments and also for rewarding users.

Scour is still in the beginning and there are some small problems with it like : try searching for : 'var/log' or the fact that it only displays 3 pages of results, but I'm sure they will be fixed and the search engine will improve over time.

Of course the whole idea of better relevancy will work only if more users will sign up , use it regularly and contribute.