HOWTO: Add a Live Forum Roll to Your Wordpress Blog
Over at Tangler we are busy finding ways for live discussions to reside where the users want them to. For example, if you have a blog post that would benefit from swarming readers into a live discussion, you can now do that using the new ‘Share’ tool to embed the topic in your blog post.
Taking this idea further, we are slowly revealing the Tangler API and this is something of a sneak peak.
Itching to give it a go, I have added a dynamic list of all my live forums to this blog’s sidebar and giving you what you need to try the same.
Instructions
If you haven’t done so already, get yourself an account on Tangler.
Download WP Tangler Live Discussion Roll and unpack it into the root of your current WP theme.
Edit tangler-sidebar.php at the top to your user-id and to the number of forums you would like to display.
Get your user-id by viewing your profile in Tangler and looking at the URL which will be http://www.tangler.com/people/id/12324. Grab the number off the end.
// Widget settings $user_id = 1454; // Your id $top = 20; // The number of forums you wanna display
In your template somewhere (mine is in sidebar template) I have then added the following:
<h5>Live Forum Roll (<a href="http://www.tangler.com">Tangler Power</a>)</h5> <ul> <?php include(TEMPLATEPATH."/tangler-sidebar.php");?> </ul>
That’s all there is to it. It’s a quick and dirty hack but it gets the job done. Next task is to turn this into a WP Plug-in.
API Methods Available Today
If you want to do more, feel free to explore the first three methods released and let me know how you go.
Example: Get a User’s Public Forums
http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/user/1454/forums/
Example: Get a Forum’s Topics
http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/forum/20801/topics/
Example: Get a Topic’s Messages
http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/topic/34074/
Have fun!
Filed under Software Development, Stuff I'm Working On, Tips | Comment (0)Web App Goal #2: Don’t Try to Change the World
If your first goal when building web applications is ‘Change the World’. Stop, take a deep breath and start again. On your blog, wiki or whiteboard, write:
“We are not trying to change the world, we are trying to give users something they need/love/want.”
or
“We are not trying to change the world, we are trying to make more money than we spend.”
Probably most of the products I have worked on have been in the ‘Change the World’ category. They are over burdened with features, confusing to users, really difficult to maintain and often fail to ship at all.
Why do we do this to ourselves when there are plenty of un-built, simple products that can be built and released in a few months and give users exactly what they need/love/want?
Focus on a known use-case, keep it simple and release as soon as possible to test against real people.
Oh, and I also agree with Web App Goal #1 .
Filed under Software Development, Stuff I'm Working On, Tips | Comment (1)Twitterers: An introduction to #tags
I felt like I was behind the times yesterday when I noticed this tweet from Chris Messina.
Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining
What’s going on with #food and #dining? The Twitterverse quickly set me straight and now I’ll help you to understand!
A similar thing happened earlier in the year when Twitterers started refering to each other like this:
Hey @philmorle, wanna get some lunch with me and @liubinskas
At first this could be seen as a geeky indulgence but as time went on everyone started to do it because it’s such a simple annotation. Then Twitter adopted the concept and started hyperlinking the names like @philmorle to link back to that user’s timeline and introduced new concepts such as Replys. At this point a very very simple idea becomes a powerful way to organise unstructured data and to make it actionable… I can do things with it.
So, now we are seeing the start of something new that is equally simple and potentialy very powerful. Where the @ prefix identifies a person, the # prefix identified a tag or category. Let’s look at Chris’ tweet again:
Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining
He’s sown a seed that can one day be watered by Twitter or developers using the Twitter API. Then we’ll see:
Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining
The hyperlinked tags link to other tweets that refer to food and dining. Doing this in the context of your own social network is particularly powerful. In my case, all the people I follow in Twitter live in a place I spend lots of time so clicking on #food in my network should suggest some great places to to try.
Here’s some more examples:
To enter Karazhan, you need to do a string of quests to get a working key. Starts with Archmage Alturus (48,76) of Violet Eye just outside Karazhan. #warcrafttips
@loic just told us all about a new time travelling API from Google #leweb3
Now I can find all the tweets about Le Web 3 conference and World of Warcraft cheats with one click.
It just keeps getting more useful. Other applications can use the Twitter API to extract #tags and discover trends, create mashups with other services with tags, and so on.
So if you are wondering what the # marks are in my timeline… now you know.
Thanks @lachlanhardy and @cameronreilly for starting me on the road to understanding.
Geeks that want to dig deeper, check out these links:
Filed under Tips | Comments (3)
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