One of the main issues that some people have been having with the FriendFeed Comments Plugin is that sometimes, seemingly randomly, it will fail to match up a post with the information from FriendFeed.  There are a couple of reasons why this does happen, but the problems all centre around the fact that I have to use the post title to match up the details because there’s no other uniquely identifiable piece of information available.

This is of course a problem when people edit the title, either due to a typo or a editorial change.  Also there seems to be some string encoding issues, especially around the 32,000 different characters that can render to look like an apostrophe.    I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to strip out the special characters and normalise the titles so I can be sure of getting a match between what’s on the blog & what’s coming back from the FriendFeed API.  I even tried just stripping out non-alphanumeric characters, but then I had a complaint from an amazingly patient person who’s site was using Cyrillic.  So what I’ve got now is a rather hodgepodge solution where it tries to strip out as many characters as possible, then does an md5 hash on that to use as the id, and some people are still having issues where, for no apparent reason, the posts won’t match up.

(more…)

I’ve just checked in a new version of the FriendFeed Comments plugin, which you can download here.  If you’ve already got it installed it should be showing up that an update’s available any moment now.

There’s a lot of code tidy ups and debug improvements, but the major change is the addition of the ability to remember your FriendFeed username & API Key when you comment on or like a post.  There’s now a ‘remember’ checkbox under the API Key field (which is now password masked, like it always should have been!).  If you tick that, it will drop a cookie onto your computer which means you don’t have to keep typing in your username & API key for that blog.

An important security note: the cookie doesn’t contain any identifiable information in it.  It just has a hash key value that is used to look up your username & api key in the blog’s database (which is stored in plain text in the blog’s database).  There is no way through the plugin for the site owner to see your API Key, but if they open their database directly, it is possible.  As in any other case, only share your API key with sites that you trust.  If you don’t tick the ‘remember’ box, your username & api key will not be stored anywhere.

As always, try it out here and then give it a go on your site if you like.  Any problems, please let me know.