Tag Archives: idno

Posted on
by

Over on my Idno development fork, I’ve pushed some functionality that I think is rather neat (and I hope will be adopted by upstream Update: it was.).

In a nutshell, I’ve started fleshing out the ability to Friend/Follow other users (based on some stuff I’ve previously kicked about).

The ability to add friends (and create posts only visible to them) is what puts the social in social network, and was functionality previously missing to idno core. An added complexity is that, since Idno is designed to be a distributed network, this needs to work across multiple installations.

Idno references users by URL, so this much was fairly straightforward, however I absolutely didn’t want people to be typing URLs into boxes to add a friend…

MF2 to the rescue!

Since everything in Idno is marked up and parse-able by it’s built in Microformats parser, Idno can easily harvest the required information when parsed a page, so all I really needed to do was pass an endpoint a URL.

So, I created a simple bookmarklet:

following

Once dragged into your toolbar, you can click on any page and your Idno installation will find any users present and allow you to add them in a couple of button clicks.

addfriend

Monocultures are considered harmful

What makes this approach especially cool is, so long as the page is marked up using simple Microformats, your friend does not need to be running Idno in order for you to add them.

Your friends could be running Elgg, WordPress, Fizzbuzz, whatever, and you can still follow them, and allow them to see private posts (using some form of authentication – more on that to come).

Have fun!

Posted on
by

Just a quick post to bring you an update on the email posting support for Idno.

The email posting plugin is a handy plugin that allows you to make posts to your Idno site via email. Unfortunately, since the way POSSE syndication buttons worked was changed a little while ago, it hasn’t been possible to post out to your silo followers in twitter/facebook/etc.

No longer! Now, you are able to specify a syndication destination by putting one or more pipe tags in the email subject line (these will be removed from the post). So, for example to post to twitter, you’d use the “|” (pipe) character before the service, and add a |twitter to the subject line.

Have fun!

» Visit the project on Github...

Posted on
by

This is a quick post to introduce you to a little plugin I wrote for wordpress, wordpress-idno-feedwidget.

The plugin creates a wordpress widget that lets you display the latest content from your Idno site in your blog sidebar. It’ll render the first 50 characters of a status update, and the titles of blog posts, with an author picture and a link to both the author profile and original posting. Image posts are also rendered, with a thumbnail view (although this could be made more efficient).

There is plenty of room for improvement; I’d like to render different types better, videos and events with an appropriate player for example, but it’s a start! The widget makes use of the JSONP endpoint, so make sure you’re using the latest codebase.

» Visit the project on Github...