Squidpunch.com

So I noticed some problems with my 360voice plugin when playing around with my 3FS blog (yeah thats right anyone can now have your very own blog at 360friendspot, go get one!).  I decided I better put together a quick fix (essentially the hyperlinks in your blog were not properly processed, and showing the actual html that creates them), while I was at it I put together a little 100% club type thing as part of the plugin.  If you didn’t know the 100% club images I built over at 360voice were done using the public APIs - and I once again used them here.

One word of warning - I used cURL this time (since my PHP knowledge has expanded a bit since the last time I worked on this plugin  (almost 1 year ago since the last update actually!)., and because my hosting actually does have cURL - I just didn’t know it.  I did not however modify the old functionality to be based on cURL or use my new way of processing the XML - maybe next update! 

So if you use my 360voiceAPI plugin for wordpress - please head on over and download the update : http://www.squidpunch.com/supported-services/360voice-plugin/

Well I have been kicking around the idea of redoing the blog for a bit now.  I finally found a theme I wanted to give a try, and made some changes to make it more like how I wanted it to look - so what do you think?  I normally “don’t do pretty”, as I have said a number of times, but I am pretty pleased with the results.  Granted I didn’t really change a ton from the original template, and I just slapped together that new header image - but I guess an old dog can learn new tricks!

Of course there might be some things not working right (let me know if you find something)- and I still have to put back some plugins / custom things I built on the old template etc…

So I have created a few different wordpress plugins

• one that connects to 360voice (shown here)
• one that connects to the live eye (shown here)
• one that pulls the gamertile of the user from xbox.com if they are using their gamertag to comment (just post your feedback to see it in action) 

Does anyone actually use my plugins on your site? 
Do you care? 
Should I make more? 
If so, what would YOU like to see? 
Would you like to use the Live Eye or Xbox tile Comment Plugins?

Just looking for some feedback from those of you that visit my little blog.

Officially the only one that is publically available is the 360voice plugin, but you can see the live eye plugin in action here (and if you want to use it let me know), and finally just put a comment to see the gamertile plugin in action

this isn’t an officially supported tool yet, since I know that there are a few small things that I have to resolve, but I just made a small modification to the plugin which would allow anyone who uses wordpress to use my plugin, if you wish. The biggest change is all the direct access to the Microsoft data has been moved to a public service provided here on my blog - removing any issues that might arrise by giving this plugin to someone who is not in the XDCP. So essentially the plugin contacts my blog to get the gamerpicture for the person who left comments on your blog, and my blog does all the communication using my XDCP account.

Maybe you care, maybe you dont, let me know if you are interested in this plugin

I dont get very many comments but I threw together a quick plugin which will generate your gamertile image next to your comments if you use a valid gamertag. Being an XDCP member has it’s perks I guess you could say, currently because of the XDCP data access I cannot provide this plugin to those outside of the program. If people really are looking for this, maybe I could change it in a way that others (outside of XDCP) could use it.

If you care, and want it - let me know

Well since I definately dont keep up with current web development technologies, especially when it comes to CSS, I have no clue why but my old theme did not look very good in firefox at all. So I have switched over to a new theme and will probably insert a few changes here and there - hopefully without breaking it

Thanks to Trapper for pointing this out to me here!

Live Eye Public API:
I have just completed the first 3 public api’s for the live eye, complete with samples here on my blog (here). The current APIs allow you to:

• Get a summary of the minutes spent on each game type
• Get a listing of your most recent activities (max 10)
• and to Get a listing of your overall top activities with the ability to filter out game types that you dont want inlcuded

some final touches, and these will be opened up to any live eye user that wants to use them =)

Voice Plugin now contains:

• Most Recent Blog entry
• Badges
• and Top 5 games

It is starting to take up more and more space on my sidebar - I may end up storing it in a page for demonstration purposes. If I am going to actually release it as a tool that others can put on their blog, I need to include ways to customize which “chunks” are shown, and perhaps even some formatting of those chunks. It will probably be a while (if ever) before I provide the plugin for download - mostly because I am by far no PHP expert, but also this is the first time I have tried to create a plugin - and I definately have a great deal to learn.

it is starting to take up a bit more space on the sidebar then I personally want to give on this site at the moment - so for now I moved it down to the bottom of the sidebar. Edit the plugin has its own page now

I was up much later then I care to admit working on a wordpress plugin. Not being extremely familar with PHP, or creating plugins added to the fact that what I decided to create uses a remote XML source, it was an interesting learning experience. The worse part about it is I had it completely working on my local test server and got a random CGI error here on the webhost. I modified the way I was parsing the XML and it seemed to resolve the problem. I might provide it for others as a download - if someone is looking for such a plug in. Currently the plugin generates a block for the 360voice Badges you have recieved. I might expand it to use some of the other API’s they provide.

This was mostly a learning experience so that I could get a better understanding on how to retrieve XML data from a remote source and use it in PHP - so that I can do so with some of the Live Eye APIs that I am currently building. The fact that I built it as a Wordpress Plugin - I just wanted to see if I could build one, and make it easier to integrate into my blog =)

Edit: well browsing the voice boards I found that the Bits Plugin all ready is a wordpress plugin that pulls up your blog entries, however it doesnt provide access to the badges - and it is having the same exact problems I was having on my first version of my plug in. I would guess this is something to do with the XML Parsing function, perhaps its not enabled on my hosting server or something like that - just letting everyone know that there is a plug-in all ready available that is similar to what I started here…..considering my PHP knowledge - it’s probably written a lot better =)