DiggFriends 0.02
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on the Vino2Vino development blog about a digg widget that displayed your friends’ digg activity on your blog. I wrote the widget in response to a request by another digg user. If you didn’t read the original post, the widget displays a list of articles recently dugg by your friends. As I said in the original post, the code was a simple proof of concept, but it drew a lot of attention and a lot of criticism.

The complaints were all pretty accurate (no built-in caching, scraping data instead of using RSS, poor styling, etc.), and I promised to address them in a future release of the widget. So here it is — DiggFriends 0.02 Beta. You can see a working example of the new version in the sidebar here on my blog.

Features

Uses the new Digg API to gather digg post data New CSS-based interface shows user profile picture and links back to user’s profile page (you can customize the interface by editing diggfriends.css in the plugin directory) Works as either a Wordpress Widget (if the Widgets Plugin is installed) or as a standalone Wordpress plugin Simple setup through the Wordpress administration panel Uses a slightly modified version of the Services_Digg toolkit to interact with the Digg API (modified to work independently of PEAR — there are no external dependencies).

Installation

Installing the WordPress plugin is pretty simple. Download the plugin and unzip it in your wp-content/plugins directory. Go to the “Plugins” tab in the Wordpress administration menu and activate the “DiggFriends” plugin (make sure you deactivate version 0.01 if you still have it installed). After activating the plugin you should see a “DiggFriends” sub-menu item under the Wordpress “Options” tab where you’ll be presented with a number of configuration options including the user to track, the number of stories to display, and cache duration, among other things.

The last step differs depending on whether or not you are using the Wordpress Widget plugin. If you aren’t using the plugin, you must place a call to the diggfriends() function in your theme file where you want the widget displayed (probably in wp-content/themes/<your theme>/sidebar.php). If you’re using the Widget plugin you can add DiggFriends to your sidebar through the drag-and-drop widget administration panel under the “Presentation” tab.

I’d like to thank all of the people who left comments on my previous post, however critical. They provided valuable guidance while implementing this new version.

Get DiggFriends-0.02