Loading ...Sorry about all the regular blog posts, I’m actually enjoying blogging these days (and I’m sure you will do too if you just find the right topic and set aside the time for doing it)! I think you’ll find this post quite interesting though, because I’ve just added another feature to my site, and it’s called….the Newsfeed!
The Newsfeed, as most of us will have seen on Facebook, aggregates our activities and their intrinsic data, and presents them in any easy to consume, chronologically ordered format, therefore keeping us updated on everything that occurs in our online world. The Newsfeed is pretty much the sole reason that Facebook is as popular as it is today. Really, it’s the one and only reason. But a Newsfeed is great feature for any socially-orientated site, even if it doesn’t have a super-complicated, VC-funded, news aggregation algorithm behind it.
My Newsfeed is incredibly simple. It imports data from Twitter (like Facebook Status Updates), links from Delicious (like Facebook Shared Links), and video/audio/photos (like the multimedia within Facebook), and presents it all on the Newsfeed tab within my Blog. If you have any CSS/HTML skills, you can do exactly the same thing with your WordPress blog (or any other web page, for that matter). Here’s how I did it (it’s incredibly easy, and it’s all thanks to Tumblr);
- I signed-up to Tumblr and imported feeds for my accounts across Twitter, Digg etc. Not that I use these services that much (Twitter is probably the only one that I believe holds any value), but taking that in to account would ruin this whole exercise.
- I took the line of JavaScript which Tumblr gave me on the ‘Extras’ page, and copied/pasted it into a ‘page template‘ for my WordPress theme. To keep things simple, I named the template ‘Newsfeed’. I then created a new page within the WP admin area, and assigned the ‘Newfeed’ template to the new page.
- I cracked open the DotNeil stylesheet, and set about styling each of the Tumblr’ed items as though they were branded by the brilliant people at each of the respective services (Twitter et al). Tumblr wraps each category of item in a unique class, i.e. ‘video’, ‘audio’, etc, which makes it easy to create CSS declarations for Twitter, video, audio, quotes etc.
- That’s about it! You just need to know some CSS, HTML, and Wordpress.
There are few downsides to using a single line of JavaScript for pulling in content, e.g. you can’t attach a commenting system to each feed item (which would be nice), and search engines won’t see the content because it’s pulled on to the page via JavaScript. But the most of the content that you’ll be feeding won’t hold much value for search engines anyway, so that’s certainly not a deal breaker. Overall, it just a nice feature to add to a site or blog (just try not to remind me that Facebook is already doing this in bigger, better, and more connected ways…).
p.s. This has really, really opened up a can of worms in terms of my plans for future ‘.coms’. I can’t stop thinking about integrating newsfeeds into sites I’ve been working on, and making new styles of newsfeed. The possibilities are endless, and the Tumblr API holds the final shard of the Triforce!
Neil - thanks for the insights - its good to see some simple names and explanations of things which inevitably in web world get wrapped up in TLA’s (three letter acronyms!) - RSS is great but takes some explaining and usually people need to see it first before it sinks in - saying newsfeeds and facebook is a great way to anchor what is actually quite a simple concept.
TLA’s?! That’s a three-letter-acronym for three-letter-acronyms; I love it! Why haven’t I heard it before?!
It’s easy to say with hindsight, but I’m suprised it took so long for social networks (or Facebook) to see the benefits in aggregating the latest activities of a user’s network in a convenient place. Geocities, Friendster, and MySpace missed a great opportunity.
Check out - http://site.gravatar.com/ - it would be great to get more people using universally accepted avatars. You could probably use it on the Trovus site.
I like your design Neil, it’s very easy on the eye.
Have you thought about releasing a plugin?
Thanks Matt. Do you mean for the WP theme, or the Tumblr feed styling?
If it’s the former - I’ve tried auctioning-off a WP theme for charity, and it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare!
If it’s the later, I’d probably need to partner with a more experienced coder so that they could handle all the GPL licensing etc. For CSS folks (or anyone with the Firebug plugin for Firefox), it should be easy enough to snoop round my stylesheet and to work out exactly what’s going on. My WP theme is built from scratch, so making universal CSS styles to fit with other peoples sites could be tricky.
Some nice chap started a ‘Tumblr Skins’ feed on Tumblr and posted my design up first. If you’re interested in integrating a Tumblr/Newsfeed, it might be worth subscribing to;
http://skins.tumblr.com/
[…] my last post, My Newsfeed, the comments touched on the problems that cryptic icons and TLA’s can bring in technology […]
Wow, this is exactly what I was wanting to do, to incorporate my “stream of consciousness” into my personal blog.
Now, to start hoping you release it as a WP plugin before I find time to implement it myself, because you’re probably more skilled at this sort of thing than I am!
I’m still have absolutely zero skills in the WP plugin department, so that’s not on the cards right now. But there are some plugins out there already. They don’t use Tumblr, but they can access most of the top sites & their APIs and will cover most of the Tumblr functionality.