#comments

Idea: Comment Aggregation via WordPress

There are lots of “conversation platforms” out there, and more arriving daily. FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader (now that it has commenting functionality); you name it. These systems are all great for getting your content out there and exposing more people to it, but the problem (in my opinion) is that it becomes really hard to follow the conversations on all of these different platforms. They all generally act as either a kind of content aggregation platform (e.g. FriendFeed/Google Reader), or as a unique content creation/delivery system, which is heavily used to redistribute existing content (e.g. Twitter). With all this aggregating going on, why not do the same thing in reverse? Mashable has just started doing something along these lines and that prompted me to finally publish this draft post.

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HOWTO: Implement Facebook Connect on WordPress (in reality)

2008-12-23: There were a number of problems with the code samples in this post previously due to some WordPress formatting problems. They are all corrected now, and you should be able to follow through this post and get this working on your own blog quite easily.

2008-12-26: Fixed a bug that caused the JS to overwrite details on a non-FB Connect comment as well. Also changed the fake email address that’s stored to include the user’s FB user ID.

In case you’ve been living under a no-technology-news rock for the last few weeks, you’ll know that Facebook Connect was released recently. I had been seeing/hearing a lot about it, including this video at Mashable, showing how to implement FB Connect in 8 minutes. So when my friend Morgan from BlownMortgage asked me if I’d be able to help him implement it on his new resume-editing site ResumeDonkey.com, I figured “how hard could it be” and said yes. Although it definitely didn’t take 8 minutes, I got it done, so I thought I’d post some details on the specific approach I used for ResumeDonkey.com.

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Comments Disabled

Well, I’ve had enough of dealing with blog-comment-spam for now, so I’ve decided to disable comments until I can come up with a satisfactory solution. I have 123 blog posts that I’m going to have go through by hand – AGAIN – to remove spam from. I don’t have time for this, but I refuse to be a PageRank monkey for these losers by leaving their links up and accessible on my site.

It really saddens me to have to do this, and I think it reflects very poorly on the current state of the internet. Damn the idiots who are blog-comment-spamming, damn them to hell and back. People like you are making the internet a worse place to be. We’d all be much happier if you would go away and die in a hole somewhere.