Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

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.

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

How to embed your FriendFeed discussions on your website

June 1st, 2008

Update: This unpublished feature has since become very well documented and I’ve also changed my website from the way I describe it below, but this should still be useful information.

I have been spending more and more time on FriendFeed, to the point that I’ve centered my entire personal website around my FriendFeed stream. The homepage of my site makes use of an unpublished feature that allows me to embed my main FriendFeed page on my own website. You can find directions for doing this at http://friendfeed.com/embed. I took this one step farther by customizing the javascript query string and CSS to produce a format that works better on my site.

However, I also wanted a sidebar widget that only displays my FriendFeed discussions (likes and comments), similar to the widgets that Twitter offers. Through the following alchemy I was able to achieve this goal:

From within FriendFeed I found the URL for the Atom feed of my discussions – http://friendfeed.com/acheslow/discussion?format=atom
Because this feed uses relative URIs for the HREFs and images I had to transform the XML into absolute URIs so the images and links would not be broken (I’ve posted this as a bug to FF). To do this I fired up Yahoo Pipes and created a simple regex transformation that replaced the item.content and item.description objects from href=”/ to href=”http://friendfeed.com/ and from src=”/ to src=”http://friendfeed.com/
I could have used the output of this pipe directly but prefer the formatting that Feedburner provides with its BuzzBoost feature, so I took the RSS-formatted output of my Yahoo Pipe and burned it using Feedburner.
Finally, using BuzzBoost I generated the javascript code to re-create the feed as HTML and embedded this script on my website using a Wordpress text widget.

You can see the results on the right-hand side of this website under “Recent Discussions”.

⇑top of page

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Feb
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Amazon

More gadget recommendations...

Follow

Follow via Twitter, RSS, or Facebook:

Archives

Calendar

Wordpress

Updated: New and Improved FFavatars.com FriendFeed Widget