Posts tagged “wordpress plugins”.

Friendfeed comments for wordpress

Conversations on the web have evolved quite a bit, in the last 4/5 years. During the late 90s, conversations on the web, was pretty much non-existant, except for a few, who used their websites to engage in conversations. The advent of the blog, made available tools to start and continue conversations. 

In the last couple of years, there has been several attempts to normalize comments, across the blogging ecosystem, and several ways have been tried. Disqus, is a company, that is in the business of aggregating comments for your blog. Seesmic, a video communications startup, has partnered with them to integrate video comments. Even after all of these innovations, getting people to comment on a blog, is still pretty difficult. 

You need, 

  - an engaged audience (the kind that wants to comment)

  - access to a critical mass of such people.

  - regular compelling content, to keep your masses.

  - friends who are A-listers, willing to quote or refer you to their audiences.

Now, with Friendfeed, I see a break away from these restrictions. All you need, is the willingness to be read and comment on a lot of people’s content, which will enable a lot of people to follow you, which means you have their attention (one might argue the attention span is very less, but nonetheless, you have a chance).

Once you have a sizable following, all you need to do, is write that compelling content, that interests your followers (which should come by, as you comment more and more). Until now, to get people to visit your blog, your content has to compelling enough for them to leave the tool they used to discover your blog, and visit it, and then want to comment. Installing the worpdress plugin for friendfeed comments removes that barrier too.

That is exactly what I have done. So, from now on, anyone who follows me in friendfeed, can leave a comment in FF, and it will be autmatically part of my comment stream (although, it is not fully integrated into my comment feed etc)

How kewl is that?!

Ipod touch/Iphone support

This website, now supports a special interface for viewing using  ipod touch/iphone. I’m using the iWPhone plugin at contentrobot.com

EX-SideRSS

After several months of keeping away from updating or changing my website, I broke the fast today. I found a wonderful plugin, sideRSS, which allows display of RSS feeds within a blog’s sidebar. As usual, I needed a specific functionality that was not supported the way I wanted it. I hacked it a little bit, renamed the plugin, and posted a custom version for download on my website.

If you need to share Google Shared Items, on your blog, but hate to include javascript (like I do), then use this. You can download it here (right-click and use “Save Target As…”) and find install information here.

Also, if you like this version, and would like me to add a few more features (I have some in mind though, like ATOM parsing), do suggest them in the comments section.

P.S: If you are Chris Hatcher, the author of the original SideRSS, and want to take this version down or something, just leave a message here – you will need to merge my changes in your code though :-)

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