I know that this is possible in some shape or form between the Facebook API and the WordPress plugin system, I’m just not sure how to implement it.

I envision a system similar to OpenID that would allow Facebook users to click a “login” button, be directed to Facebook servers where they confirm that they wish to login to the site, and then are redirected back to the WordPress blog. They can now post comments or perform any other task that they are authorized for, all while associated with their Facebook identity. You could even take this a few steps further and have actions (leaving a comment, writing a post, etc) posted to the mini-feed… and pull in their current profile picture to place beside posts/comments/where ever (there are tons of things you could do with the information from Facebook).

I’m sure it’s morally inappropriate to do something like this, seeing as the Facebook system is a “walled garden” while OpenID is an open extensible platform. However, the power of Facebook’s “social graph” is not to be underestimated. And I’m not suggesting replacing OpenID or the WordPress login system – this would simply be another alternative. Perhaps a better idea is the creation of a flexible login system (think PAM for Linux), making it simple for developers to add new login methods to WordPress. More choice is better, right?

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions? I’ve looked at the OpenID plugin for WordPress, but I’m not sure if that would be a beneficial place to start or not and I’m definitely not yet informed enough to write a plugin to do such (I need to learn more about PHP, the Facebook API, MySQL, and WordPress). Should this be attempted at all? The only reason that this idea struck me as appealing is the shear number of friends, family and acquaintances that I have on Facebook. And I’m pretty sure this isn’t something I can tackle by myself (at least not in any reasonable amount of time).

Seems they beat me to it. Oh well … Unfortunately it only works with WordPress.com blogs for now, but the possibility of opening the functionality to hosted blogs (such as this one) will come if we ask for it (or write it ourselves). I am not using a WordPress.com blog, so I can’t tell you if it works well or not, but you can read more about it here if you’re interested.

The best part? The story excerpts in your feed link straight to the blog post!  I currently use the Facebook Notes RSS import feature, which requires several clicks to arrive at the actual post… rather annoying.

A statistic on the front page of Akismet states that “94% of all comments are spam.” I must agree; for the 71 legitimate comments currently posted to this site since January 2006, the Akismet filter has captured 7,211 spam comments – putting my site at an even more astounding ratio: 99.02% of all comments are spam! If I had to manually moderate every single message, I’d be forced to disable commenting – but thanks to Akismet and it’s community of users, I can click a handy “delete all” button and *poof* no more spam.

Now occasionally I glance over the Akismet spam queue… and usually its the same old “Hey nice site, visit mine:” followed by 15 links titled “buy zanax now!” and left by some dimwit named “Bob” or “Bill” with an email address composed of random letters. Today, however, I had one curious comment awaiting me (not yet marked as spam). It went something like this:

What would you do if you
Knew all of the things we knew
Would you stand up for truth
Or would you turn away too
And then what if you saw
All of the things thats wrong
Would you stand tall and strong
Or would you turn and walk away

Followed by a link to some site I’d never heard of. Seeing as how this was posted as a comment to the “About” page (which doesn’t even have a comment box) and it didn’t make a lot of sense, I had to check the link out… and it appears to belong a content scraper trying to make an easy buck. So – a quick click on “Spam It” and that problem was solved (for me and every one else using Akismet).

See, Akismet is peer-to-peer spam blocking. By marking a comment as spam, you enter that into the Akismet database and it will be filtered automatically in the future. The power of the network – like an invisible glass wall for all those stupid spammers!

The moral of the story? Get Akismet… oh and P2P isn’t always bad – in fact, in my opinion, it’s always good.

With the recent addition of another writer and a plan to write at least sixty posts next month (and keep up the trend in the coming months), the issue of archives and “lost content” is coming into play. Currently the only way to find older content is via Google, because for some random reason I disabled the internal search (bad move) or, by browsing the articles using the “previous posts” link at the bottom of the main page (at one time I had a real archive section I broke it through various upgrades and changes).

However, simply having a mere “archives” page isn’t going to cut it. I want to devise a more intuitive and user-friendly way for curious readers to find more related content. So far, I hope to implement some of the following (through current and to-be-written plugins and enhancements):

• Links to Related Posts at the end of each article
• List of recent comments on the main page (so you can easily find active discussions)
• Some way of listing popular posts on the front page – perhaps by votes or by visits
• Definitely re-enable searching!
• Tag cloud?
• Better structure and tagging of pre-existing and future articles (this will require going back and editing the 100+ articles currently in the archives)

These are just a few preliminary ideas that I have come up with while contemplating the future design of digivation (and I am aware of the plugin options for implementing these ideas). I also hope to keep the layout open enough to integrate the dis-used photo gallery into the site.

Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll be creating mock-ups and looking for inspiration. If you have any suggestions or ideas on how to tackle some of the outlined problems, please do not hesitate to leave a comment!

The Plan

The current plan is to write a simple plugin for WordPress that will connect to Facebook and retrieve your status for display on your WordPress blog. Why? Well, the Twitter service has been in the buzz recently, and a WordPress plugin was released to allow you to display your Twitter status on your blog. However, Twitter does (as far as I can tell) nothing more than allow you to post a little status blurb – just like Facebook. However, Facebook has a vast network and many more features… so why create and use another service for only one small thing? Instead, I could just import my Facebook status into my blog and be done with it.

Maybe others will see the same. My new plugin will be called Facebook Status for WordPress and will be named wp-facebook-status. As my PHP programming skills get better, and assuming that I find the time, I may write more plugins to implement further Facebook features (and possibly release an integrated suite that allows you to import all sorts of information from Facebook). For now, I’m just going to get my toes wet.

Please, if you have any comments, suggestions, encouragements, critiques, or other information, leave a comment!