Showing all posts in the category "Personal:

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Updated: New and Improved FFavatars.com FriendFeed Widget

March 29th, 2009

I’ve just moved the FFavatars widget to its own domain — FFavatars.com — and updated it with some nifty new features.

For those that missed the original post, FFavatars shows your favorite FriendFeed followers on your blog or website. And now, it can also display your followers in a single widget combined with the standard FriendFeed badge and status widgets.

The new website makes it even easier to customize the widget for your own site, so head over to FFavatars.com and try it out.

A Dead Simple Way To Rotate Ads

March 26th, 2009

You’ll notice (please!) that I have a grid of four square ads on the top of my right-hand sidebar. I wanted to find a way of randomly rotating a number of different ads into those four positions. I don’t need anything fancy beyond that, and none of the WordPress plugins that I found really worked for me, so I decided to hack something up myself.

I’m using LinkShare.com to deliver these ads, but the following approach should work for any ad source.

First, let’s take a look at what my sidebar.php template looked like before. This code snippet shows where I had four ads hardcoded into specific positions. I’m calling the links ad1.html through ad4.html and the images img1.png through img4.png just as an example:

<a href="http://link.to/ad1.html"><img src="http://link.to/img1.png"></a>
<a href="http://link.to/ad2.html"><img src="http://link.to/img2.png"></a>
<a href="http://link.to/ad3.html"><img src="http://link.to/img3.png"></a>
<a href="http://link.to/ad4.html"><img src="http://link.to/img4.png"></a>

So to replace those four static ads with, say, six ads that rotate randomly through the four positions, I just replaced the above code with the following:

<?php
$ads = array(
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad1.html"><img src="http://link.to/img1.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad2.html"><img src="http://link.to/img2.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad3.html"><img src="http://link.to/img3.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad4.html"><img src="http://link.to/img4.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad5.html"><img src="http://link.to/img5.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad6.html"><img src="http://link.to/img6.png"></a>'
);

shuffle($ads);
foreach (array_splice($ads, 0, 4) as $ad) { echo "$ad\n"; }
?>

And that’s it! Each time your sidebar is loaded it will randomly display four of your six ads in different positions each time. On my site I use WP Super Cache to improve performance, so you won’t actually see a different set of ads on the same page, but if you click to another page you’ll notice that the ads have refreshed.

Too Good To Be True… But True!

March 23rd, 2009

It’s so rare to be treated to excellent service from a company that also provides an excellent product at an excellent price, and that’s why I have to post about my experience tonight with my web hosting provider Arvixe. I don’t have any affiliate links, advertising, or any other business arrangements with Arvixe; I’m just a very happy customer (well actually I do get a 10% discount for including a link to Arvixe in the footer of my website, but that has nothing to do with this post).

I first signed up with Arvixe a little over a year ago. It seemed like a small operation but the price was unbeatable and I figured I’d give them a try. Since then I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with them, and the few times that I’ve needed help I’ve always found them to be very responsive.

Case in point… Tonight I decided I wanted to upgrade my plan to one that can host more than two domains. I started an online chat with Steve from Arvixe technical support and determined that I could actually upgrade from the older plan I was on to a newer plan that offered hosting for six domains, plus more storage and bandwidth, for the same price I’m paying now. Steve flipped a few switches and pushed a few buttons and within a couple of minutes my account was transparently upgraded to the new plan.

Now here’s the real kicker — the price. I’m now getting 300 GB of storage, 3 TB of monthly bandwidth, hosting for 6 separate domain names, unlimited sub-domain names, full support for domain name email (HTTP/POP/IMAP), PHP, WordPress, MySQL, and all the other standard cPanel goodies. And the price?

$60

A month? No, $60 per year, and I could have chosen to pay for two years in advance for as little as $48/year. I don’t know how they do it, but they’re doing it, and they have been for quite some time. My only concern is that they might actually start to get too big, so perhaps I should just keep my mouth shut. But these guys really deserve a shout-out.

Thanks guys!

Testing Tweetizen

March 23rd, 2009

Tweetizen is a simple web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and easily find the ones that are relevant to you. I’ll be testing Tweetizen here to see how it brings in discussions from the twittersphere that are relevent to consumer electronics and connected devices. If the content and format look promising then I may move this to a more prominent place on the website.

FFavatars – A FriendFeed Subscribers Widget

March 22nd, 2009

Display your favorite Friendfeed followers’ avatars right on your own website.

[Update: This widget has moved to FFavatars.com. Please follow that link to customize your own widget.]

Let me just get this out up front. I love FriendFeed. I always have and I probably always will. As you can tell, I’ve practically built my entire website around FriendFeed’s services, including their cool-o-nifty embedded feed widget on my homepage and their badge widget down there on the right-hand side of the page.

Robert Scoble and I Throwing Down The FF Gang Sign at the FriendFeed Lunch in Bellevue, 2008

A few days ago I posted an idea in the FriendFeed Feedback room suggesting that they should also provide a widget that shows the avatars of one’s subscribers. I was thinking of something like the friends block on Facebook, or like other widgets such as MyBlogLog and TwitterRemote. Then last night I starting thinking about building such a widget myself. I’ve never written anything like this before and I know just enough PHP to hurt myself, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to teach myself about JSON.

Thanks to the awesome FriendFeed API documentation, I wound up with a working prototype in just a few hours. Unfortunately the FF API doesn’t directly implement a way to fetch one’s subscribers, so I had to work around this by fetching the list of friends that you are subscribed to and then checking each of those friends to see if they are subscribed back to you. The result isn’t all of your friends, but only those friends who are subscribed to you that you are also subscribed to in return. I’ll call this a feature and say that it filters only your best friends (BFFFF’s).

You can see the widget now on my right-hand sidebar. (That’s right over there ==>)

And here’s how you can try it out on your own website:

[Update: This widget has moved to FFavatars.com. Please follow that link to customize your own widget.]

That’s it! I had to workaround the lack of a subscribers API (nudge, nudge, FF team). So instead of showing all of your friends this only shows 15 random friends by default, unless you change the max parameter. This is probably a good thing anyway.

Also note that the first time your widget loads it may take a few seconds, but after that it will serve the latest cached copy much faster. The cache will be refreshed with a new group of random friends after a short period of time.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please leave a note in the comments section below.

Thanks!
Alan

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Updated: New and Improved FFavatars.com FriendFeed Widget

A Dead Simple Way To Rotate Ads

Too Good To Be True… But True!

Testing Tweetizen

FFavatars – A FriendFeed Subscribers Widget

Display your favorite Friendfeed followers’ avatars right on your own website.

Next Entries »

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