Adding FriendFeed To The Blog Sidebar Using SimplePie

March 19th, 2008

Hopefully you haven’t completely overdosed on FriendFeed, but I finally got around to shoehorning my FriendFeed Feed into this blog’s sidebar. Look to the lower right and it should be there.

I’d been going back and forth with Mike in the comments and he recommended SimplePie, which has a plugin that finally did the trick.

There are two SimplePie plug ins that need to be installed, SimplePie Core and SimplePie Plugin for Wordpress. Once installed, you add a little pHp code to the sidebar template to call up the proper feed, and there you go.

The power of SimplePie is then within the plugin interface. Specifically, you can make templates for how you want your feed to appear. In my case, I just wanted two items of the feed in particular, so I tweaked the “blog_style_full” template to get something closer to what I wanted. That done, adding some CSS styling shouldn’t be too big of a deal.

So anyhow, thanks a bunch to Mike for pointing me in this direction. I spent way too long messing around in Yahoo! Pipes.

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  • I'm glad you found the plugin useful. Let us know if you have thoughts about improving it. :)
  • Mike
    Nice!! And way cool to see a SimplePie dev commenting here...good stuff, guys. :D

    I gotta get off my duff and stop using the default SimplePie styling. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use the service icons next to each feed item (or find another way to differentiate between feed items).
  • I'm curious if you've come up with a way to differentiate the feed items on friendfeed so that you can include graphics. I'm trying to solve the same problem today. Simplepie seems to recognize certain site names in the $item->get_title() method; but I don't see how to divide it out to add graphics.
  • Mike
    Russel, I'm not that good at this, heh...if you manage to figure it out, I'd be very grateful if you could share. :)

    I found a WordPress plugin that aggregates the individual services, but it's not FriendFeed.
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