Realespace

The iGoogle team announced today that they have extended the iGoogle api and introduced some new features.

The three new features are:

1. updated navigation, similar to the Facebook app menu
2. new canvas setting so application can take up more screen real estate, similar to Facebook’s canvas page
3. friend update widget, similar to the Facebook update notifications

As you can see, iGoogle has Facebook in the crosshairs with open social as their weapon, and frankly, Facebook should be scared.

Actually, Wordpress, Six Apart, Facebook, and even smaller collaboration software vendors that have utilized Open Social should be scared. When Open Social was first announce, we installed the shindig server to integrate Open Social with all the blogs we develop. Each blog network using Wordpress Multi-user would be an Open Social container.

The idea was put on the back burner of our development because of two things, mainly the OpenSocial server (Shindig) was not very good. Open Social was announce with the intent that developers would make widgets for existing networks such as Ning, and Orkut, not making all new newtworks. Secondly, Wordpress actually has very good plugin system, that can be extended, although not a lot of developers do.

For Example,
when a developer writes a plugin, that plugin can then be extended by other developers by the use of hooks and actions. Our RateWindow™ widget is an example of this. Once a user installed the RateWindow™ application on their site, other developers can access hooks within the RateWindow™ widget. The RateWindow™ application comes with a built in e-newsletter application that can be used be the owner of the widget to brand themselves via email. We have developed a property listing widget that can be used with the RateWindow™ widget. Not only does recent blog posts get sent in the e-newsletter, but the Realtors listings, profile, and any other plugin that “Hooks up” to RateWindow.

If you not a developer, this probably makes no sense, so let’s just put it this way. All your blog plugins can communicate with each other and extend your branding. For more information contact me, I’d love to bore you with the details.

The major drawback with using Wordpress plugins as a make shift Open Social application distribution is that the Wordpress database is completely wide open because of similar naming conventions and the Wordpress database classes. Any developer can use simple code to grab anything from the database and exploit it.

I’m a big fan of Wordpress, and will continue to develop for the Wordpress platform, but today marks a big change in our thinking and development. The ideals of community building and collaboration are changing and

I stumbled a wordpress plugin today that was very interesting. The plugin added audio to your posts by creating an MP3 of either a male or female reading the post. The plugin is made by Vozme.com and it’s pretty slick.

Even though it is a good plugin, I don’t think we will use it anytime soon, but it is good to know about and it was fun to hear some of our posts read by an irish robot. It was easy to install, activate and deactivate.

Wordpress Options:

The Vozme.com has many examples of how to implement their application into Wordpress and non-Wordpress websites.

I want to thank Reggie at mytechopinion.com for helping me with a wordpress plugin for excluding pages. I tried it and it works great.

This solution is much better then the solution I made. My solution required the blog owner to upload admin files that would need to be re-uploaded everytime the blog owner updated their site.

download the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages

While I was looking for the solution I found that many blogs use the websites categories instead of pages in their navigation. This makes a lot of sense to me since categories make the website more understandable.

to list categories instead of pages, you would replace wp_list_pages() with wp_list_categories()…simple enough.
here is the Wordpress codex on listing categories

Long time ago I was a big fan of Ultimate Tag Warrior wordpress plugin for tagging my posts. I loved that plugin. It was definitely in my top 3. Now that Wordpress has incorporated tagging (term taxonomy), UTW has all but disappeared. I think it is still around, but last time I looked for it, I could not find a version for Wordpress 2.3. Wordpress now has all the functions for terms and tags and you really don’t need UTW anymore.

The feature I really liked about it was the ability to do a yahoo keyword search based on the post content and then choose which keywords you want to use for tags.

I found a couple auto-taggers, but each of them included all the keywords from yahoo for your post. I would rather pick and choose the keywords for tags. So I wrote my own plugin.

Download the plugin here

It’s really simple. the button is added directly below the edit field for writing a post.

Once you are finished with your blog post, and before you publish it, just click the button and it will return all the keywords for the post. Then click on the tag and it automatically gets added to your the tags input.

Please note:
The hosted by godaddy checkbox is important. If your website is hosted with godaddy.com, you have to check that box to get results. This is because godaddy.com make you go through proxy servers to fetch remote content using CURL.

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        $curl = curl_init(); curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
 
curl_setopt($curl,CURLOPT_VERBOSE,1);
 
if(get_option('godaddy_host'))
 
{
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
 
//"http://64.202.165.130:3128"
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_PROXY,"http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128");
 
}
 
curl_setopt($curl,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30 );
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,500 );
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "appid=testingyahoo&output=php&context=".$_POST['context']);
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
 
$res = curl_exec( $curl );
 
curl_close( $curl );

More information on the api for Yahoo context search

Update: 3-10-08
Fixed permission denied error on the ajax call.