I bit the bullet & updated the FriendFeed Comments plugin to version 1.0.  I then noticed a couple of other things I needed to do, so I immediately updated it to 1.1.  So lets just say we skipped 1.0 Ok?

No real functionality changes, just a bit of housekeeping and admin tweaks.  The plugin will now warn you if you haven’t entered a FriendFeed nickname in after activating the plugin.  Also, after saving your nickname on the options page, it puts up a reminder to put the <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?> tag in your single post template.

So get it running & let me know what you think!

Thank you to everyone who’s installed the FriendFeed plugin.  The feedback has been very helpful. I got svn access for the WordPress Plugin hosting, so the plugin now exists on the WordPress plugins site.  The upshot of this is that it will now be included in the WordPress automatic updates, so if your version of WordPress supports that, you should start seeing updates for it on your plugin pages. 

Speaking of updates, I’ve just checked in an update that shows the likes as well as the comments.  So you will now get a list of the people who ‘liked’ your post as well as the comments. I’ve also tweaked the HTML it generates a bit, so if you’d setup some CSS rules around the plugin, you might want to check they all still work after updating.

I’ve got some default styling rules that you can apply to get started, otherwise the plugin is just going to give you two vertical lists, which probably isn’t what you want

#togglefriendfeedcommentslink { color: #333; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; }

#friendfeedicon { float: left; border: none; padding: 0 4px 0 0; }

#friendfeedlikeslist ul, #friendfeedlikeslist ul li { display: inline; }

#friendfeeddiscussions { margin: 10px 0 0 0; clear: both; }

Can I recommend the Cross-theme Stylesheets plugin to make this simpler.  You can create a stylesheet just for this plugin that can be edited inside the WordPress admin section, independent of the theme’s styles.

Update: Just got my first TechCrunch link!

Well, FriendFeed released their API yesterday, along with pre-written php & python libraries.  It’s a really good API, got access to all the data you see on the site.  So I’ve written up a WordPress plugin that will pull back comments from FriendFeed & show them on your site.  This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post. 

I keep trying to think of a more succinct way of writing that but I can’t.  I always sounds more confusing than it is. See the plugin page for more details, this is an early beta I can’t stress that enough.  It will have bugs, it may very well break. 

Anyone who is willing to help beta test would be very welcome, you can download the zip file here. Unzip that into your plugins folder & activate it.  You’ll then need to go into the options (or settings if you’re running WP2.5) and click on FriendFeed.  Put your FriendFeed nickname in & save.  You’ll then need to drop the new template tag <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?> on to your single post template somewhere inside ‘the loop’.  I put mine just above the <?php comments_template(); ?> call.

Much thanks to Corvida for being my first guinea pig tester.  It seems to be working on her site, and she gets a lot of comments!