Presented today at BarCamp Boston on programming for the Twitter API, based on the retweeter project I did for SXSW this year. You can grab the slides or the code.
Went better than the WordPress talk yesterday, in terms of time – easier to describe Twitter (which everyone already knows) than to try to cover the WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the plugin I wrote to connect the two all in less than 30 minutes.
I presented yesterday at BarCamp Boston 3 on the topic of WPBook, the WordPress plugin for pulling blog posts into Facebook and letting people comment on them with their Facebook identities.
Here’s the presentation file: WordPress to Facebook and Back (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license)
As always, you can get the latest code here, or see it in action on Facebook.
I found it was very difficult to do a 30 minute presentation here – 45 would have been better, and an hour would have been perfect. I should have spent more time focused on three key aspects: the core WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the bigger picture of how they relate to each other.
That way I could have shown, for example, the WordPress loop and how that works, and some of the Facebook PHP client, and how a user’s request goes through Facebook to your WordPress blog and back to their browser.
I’ll try to set a bit more context in my Twitter talk later today, though 30 minutes will be a challenge there as well.
(Update 5/17 – 0.7.1 is now available – bug fix release).
I’ve spent some time over the past few nights revising the wp-book plugin, which lets you bring your WordPress (self-hosted) blog into Facebook as an application, and I’ve published a new 0.7 version.
Continue reading →
Updated 5/31/08 – Like The Wealth of Networks, Two of these books are also available online: Two Bits and The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It.
Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.
It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.
What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?
Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) is quickly rising to the top of my summer reading list (about which more to come in a later blog post). The distinctions he draws (based on his recent talks, see video here, here, and here) between sterile and generative platforms, and the concerns he raises about contingently generative or tethered platforms, seem to me right on target, and consistent with the issues Tim O’Reilly has been raising (along with, of course, many others) about how to translate the freedom behind free software and the openness behind open source into a world in which services and data live in the cloud.
One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube‘s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].
Three things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Memory Tree in Toronto, Miro and Kaltura.
Continue reading →