Dan Kingsley .com

I have been working on the back end of my website for the last couple of days in the few spare minutes that I have had. I have added a couple of cool little features.

1. I have added my status update – imported from Facebook and Twitter. My status is normally the same in both of the these places (as explained in my previous post), and so I thought it made sense to have this imported alongside my blog for those of you who don’t have Facebook or use Twitter!

2. Music Currently Playing. I started using last.fm ages ago, but I have recently (last week) installed a couple of plug-ins to allow the music that I play in iTunes and Spotify to be added to my profile at last.fm. This creates a list of music I have recently listened to. I therefore also thought it made sense to have this displayed on my blog. I will automatically update every 2minutes. I had to do a bit of editing of the code for this last.fm plug-in to enable it to display exactly as I wanted on my site. For example I needed to add a small amount of code to check if last.fm knew the album, and if not, then not to display the it.

3. I also added a random photo generator to display six random photos from my collection.

So, since I mentioned this on twitter yesterday, I have had a couple of messages asking me how! I even had a phone call…

So I thought I would summarise it for you. I originally got this from a website called Internet Duck Tape which I found via a quick google search for ‘Facebook status to Twitter’. So how to do it!

Well, Facebook produces an RSS feed from your status updates, so first off you need to get this. Go to:

http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11

and scroll down on the right hand side. It will say “Subscribe to these stories” and then under that an RSS link to “my status”. That is the RSS feed you need. If you are using Firefox (which you should be) then right click on this and click “copy link location”.

OK that is step one completed. Now, go to:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/dankingsley/facebook_status

Here you can paste the RSS feed from which you have just copied. By using this, it will remove your name from your status since you won’t want this when adding to Twitter. Paste into the box where it says “Enter your Facebook RSS URL” and then click on “Run Pipe”. Next you need to get hold of this rss feed. Do this by right clicking on “Get as RSS” just below and again clicking “copy link location”.

Right, now for the final step. Go to http://www.twitterfeed.com and log in using an open id. I just used my google account. Once logged in click on “Create New Feed”. Follow the instructions, but basically enter your twitter username and password, then paste in the rss feed link you just copied from the pipes website, select how often you want it to update and if you want a prefix – eg I have added (Facebook Update) in front of mine so that people know it is my Facebook status. Then click create! Everything is now done!

So that probably looks quite complicated for what actually happens… but its really not. To summarise:

1. Go to Facebook.

2. Copy your RSS status feed.

3. Go to Pipes.

4. Paste in RSS feed.

5. Run the pipe.

6. Copy the new RSS feed.

7. Go to Twitterfeed and log in.

8. Click on “Create new feed”.

9. Fill in details.

10. Update your Facebook status!

So, you probably haven’t heard, but Facebook announced this morning that they are making some more changes to the homepage. They have spent a long time working on “Facebook Pages” – what companies or people use on Facebook to advertise etc, but I’m sure most of you aren’t that interested about that…

The thing you may be interested in, is the Facebook homepage. Below is a screen shot of what it is going to look like:

Facebook will be making these changes by the middle of next week I believe, so I just thought I’d give you some warning really.

To summarise what they are actually doing though:

1. I think the main feature, is that they are replacing the ‘news feed’ with the ‘live feed’. I believe this is a great feature, it is keeping Facebook up to date, instead of reading about things your friends did  yesterday you can read about what your friends have just done!

2. They are adding the section on the left to allow you to filter exactly what is shown in the feed. They currently already had these options along the top, but they just weren’t that obvious, now you can’t miss them! If you have added your friends to groups, then you will be able to filter it out so that you can only see a select group of friends – in theory very useful. But i bet that the average user won’t use half of these features!

3. The publisher isn’t really that big a deal at all, it is probably making things simpler since they already use ‘the publisher’ at the top of everyone’s profile.

So the updates aren’t anything major, but hopefully useful.

Cool, so I have actually done this! I have spent the last couple of days updating and sorting this website out It is slowly gaining more and more content. I have set up some very cool features, including all my photos getting imported from Facebook to this site, as well as my videos from YouTube. This will hopefully allow people without Facebook to see the photos, and also it should easily allow you to find my videos without having to search YouTube.

I have updated my About page, and am in the middle of sorting out the Design and Faith pages. These should hopefully be finished within the next week or so.