BackType

Jan 30th My Comments Wordpress Plugin

Social activity on blogs in total dwarfs social activity on any particular social network. —David Recordon Open Platforms Tech Lead, Six Apart

Commenting is an incredibly ubiquitous social activity; the reason we created an API is so that developers could leverage our growing dataset of comments for other applications.

Using our API, Wesley from Improving The Web recently created a Wordpress plugin called My Comments Elsewhere that caught our attention. In his words,

This plugin collects the comments you posted on other people’s websites and lets you display them on your own blog.

After installing and configuring the plugin for use with BackType, you’ll be able to display comments in a widget, as a paginated listing (on a page), or as a daily/weekly digest post on your blog. The plugin is also highly customizable both in function and appearance. For example, you can see Wesley’s comments here.

While we offer our own widgets to display comments on your blog, this plugin will give you much more flexibility and functionality. We highly recommend trying it out; in fact, we’re using it here on this blog to display our comments as well.

Are you working on something that uses the BackType API? Let us know!

Tags: backtype, plugin, wordpress

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Developers, plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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15 Responses to “My Comments Wordpress Plugin”

jamie says:

Jan 31st at 12:30 am

Awesome post. Thanks

Taylor Davidson says:

Jan 31st at 7:46 pm

Mike & Chris: Displaying (promoting) comments that we leave around the web (and remember, commenting is a form of blogging) is indeed something we have been talking about for a while (especially with Bryan Landers).

The flexibility of the plugin is awesome: now what do we do with it

(again, highlighting one of the benefits of offering API access to the data and allowing developers to find a range of ways to use it…)

Bryan Landers says:

Feb 1st at 12:38 am

I like the WP widget. It certainly covers getting the bulk of your comments in there. Where I see room for creative improvement: making it feel engaging and easy to interact with (and even designy).

For this I think BackType should offer trends for each user (guessing this could be implemented based on the site-wide trends functionality). These would be the most common words in the author's comments presented as tags (could be a common tag cloud with varying sizes).

Additionally, a search field would be excellent as the user could simply enter topics that interest them and see if they are mentioned in the author's comments. Auto-generated tags = passive, search field = active.

With the addition of those 2 features, you'd only need to display 1-3 recent comments, since people's attention will probably not stretch beyond that. For design, you could use the author's profile picture…imagine a comment card. Collectible, sharable, identity trading cards!

Christopher Golda says:

Feb 1st at 6:31 am

Tags and search are both interesting; I think you'll find that we'll play a more active role in the latter

Comment card, community card — lots possible

Thanks for the comment

Taylor Davidson says:

Feb 1st at 8:30 am

I don't completely understand Bryan's love for tags; maybe it is the designer in him.

But search I get. Structuring data for analysis is more powerful than structuring data merely for display.

Bryan Landers says:

Feb 1st at 8:50 pm

In this instance, think of tags simply as preset search terms that guarantee the user results since they are dynamically created based on that exact author's comments (5-10 most used words, for example). At a glance you can get an idea of relevant topics to this author without having to generate your own search term. How they are displayed is an independent design concern.

Chirax says:

Feb 5th at 4:51 pm

Hey Guys as I have already mailed Christopher. Please make the this work for Wordpress.com also. In meanwhile here is a shity implementation of the same widget, meanwhile. On wordpress.com add a RSS Widget and give the feed address as http://feeds.backtype.com/USERNAME . This looks really bad but now at least you have something.

Christopher Golda says:

Feb 5th at 10:46 pm

Thanks, Chirag.

It's unfortunate for WP.com users, but we'll look into offering something soon.

Web Laureate says:

Feb 6th at 9:54 pm

finally, something that will help me keep track of all my chitting and chatting around the web — http://web-poet.com/2009/02/06/backtype/

Ford Ranger Forum says:

Feb 18th at 9:19 am

great article.visited your site for first time today,but i must say your write is of top notch and i will surely frequent your site.

henriksen butler says:

Feb 23rd at 3:37 am

I'm using wordpress. Well I haven't using it since after newyear because of being busy and now I've found a lot of nice programs in the net that makes me leave wordpress.