Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

How to Include a Daily Digest of Ma.gnolia Links in Your Feeds

I’ve had a couple of folks ask me how I include a daily digest of all of my newly added Ma.gnolia links in my RSS feed, so I thought I would provide a very quick rundown.

FeedBurner is the foundation of the functionality, as it makes it very easy to harness the wealth of feeds provided by Ma.gnolia. Once you’ve signed up for the free service and set up a site, click on the Optimize tab and then select LinkSplicer in the sidebar. At that point just follow the directions they provide you and select the “As a once-a-day summary only”. Once your site is using FeedBurner to serve your feeds, the Ma.gnolia links will show up automatically each night assuming you added at least one new link to your Ma.gnolia account.

Users of WordPress should check out the FeedBurner plugin by Steve Smith, which makes the transition to FeedBurner a smooth one.

Posted in Magnolia Plugin, WordPress & Tagged: Magnolia, rss, Web Development

Ma.gnolia Plugin 1.4 Released

Thanks to Rick and Emre for the excellent suggestions which prompted these improvements to the Ma.gnolia WordPress plugin:

• Added the ability to pull bookmarks from group collections as well as those of individual people. Tags can be used with either, so you can pull bookmarks from the Web Design group that have been tagged with ‘css’.
• Added ability to pull the Full feed from Ma.gnolia, which includes:
  • Thumbnails of each bookmark
  • The tags applied to each bookmark

  Please note, this is all or nothing, so you cannot just pull the image, or the image and description without the tags. Sorry, but that’s how it’s coming through and I spent too much time trying to find a way around it with a couple of different RSS parsers.

• Changed the variable $username to $collection to fit the new model of pulling from groups or individuals. This shouldn’t impact your site as it is more of a clean-up task.
• Added configuration option to enable/disable the link to view more Ma.gnolia bookmarks
• Added the plugin to wp-plugins.net/ to ease updates for folks using Update Manager to track plugin updates (like me).

Please check out the official page to download the latest version and the new examples page to learn more about the plugin.

Note: for Users of 1.3: You should be able to drop this upgrade in place without changing any of your code. Please let me know if you notice any issues with your existing setup.

Posted in Magnolia Plugin & Tagged: Magnolia, php, WordPress

The New Ma.gnolia Wordpress Plugin

Barry Price, the creator of the Ma.gnolia plugin for WordPress has set its development aside and has encouraged me to adopt the project. As I use the plugin heavily on this site, and I enjoy development, I decided to take him up on it.

This plugin makes it easy to output a list of your Ma.gnolia bookmarks anywhere on your site. You can set it to only pull bookmarks with a specific tag, which is great for listing sites related to a specific category or post.

Please download the plugin and provide me your feedback in the comments of this page. I’ll do my damnedest to fix any bugs you report and look forward to expanding it to be even more useful!

Update

I’ve updated the plugin. Please go to the official page for the latest version: Ma.gnolia Plugin.

Magnolia WordPress Plugin

Make sure to join the Plugin group on Ma.gnolia to add your site to the list if you are using this plugin!

Install

• Drop the entire plugin folder into wp-content/plugins/ - the final paths will be:
  • wp-content/plugins/magnolia/last_rss.php
  • wp-content/plugins/magnolia/magnolia.php
• Activate the plugin in the admin area of your wordpress install

To Use

This plugin is very basic at the moment, so all it takes once you’ve installed the plugin is a single line of PHP, inserted wherever you want the list of links to appear. You can pass the following variables to the plugin:

• $username is the Ma.gnolia account to use, this is typically your account.
• $numLinks sets the amount of links you want the tag to output, this defaults to 10.
• $showDescriptions tells the tag whether or not it should include descriptions in the output. This defaults to “Do Not Show”.
• $showPubDates tells the tag whether or not it should output the date the URL was bookmarked in Ma.gnolia. This defaults to “Do Not Show”.
• $useMagnoliaLinks determines whether the links should point directly to the bookmarked URL, or the bookmark’s page on Ma.gnolia. This defaults to the Bookmark’s actual URL.
• $tag allows you to pass in a tag to narrow down the list of results. Only bookmarks matching that tag will be output. This is empty by default, so it pulls all bookmarks regardless of their tags. Use a plus sign (+) to separate multi-word tags. For example “web+design”.

The output consists of an unordered list, each link contained in a separate list item tag.

Example of Usage

Here’s a snippet to output three bookmarks, with their associated descriptions from my bookmark list, regardless of the tag.


<?php magnolia('BaldTechnologist',3,1,0); ?>


Example Output


<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/17328648@N00/sets/1737284/" title="Cool &amp; Wacky Records - a photoset on Flickr:: No Description" class="ToolTip">Cool &amp; Wacky Records - a photoset on Flickr</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.fortymedia.com/blog/post/59" title="Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise:: Attention is the most fundamental unit of design. Once you get past the color schemes, typography, layouts, graphical treatments, etc., it all comes down to guiding and shaping the viewer’s attention." class="ToolTip">Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise</a></li>
<li><a href="http://haha.nu/misc/html-tags-illustrated/" title="HTML Tags illustrated:: A collection of photos that demonstrate HTML tags." class="ToolTip">HTML Tags illustrated</a></li>
<li class="MagnoliaLink"><a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/people/BaldTechnologist/bookmarks" title="Alex Jones on Ma.gnolia::Browse through the sites and pages that I have added to my bookmark list on Ma.gnolia. If you're a member, add me as a contact!" class="ToolTip">View my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia</a></li>
</ul>


Other Examples

Five Bookmarks Tagged with “Design”, No Descriptions, Pointing to the Original URL


<?php magnolia('BaldTechnologist',5,0,0,0,'design'); ?>


Ten Most Recent Bookmarks with their Descriptions and the Time they Were Saved to Ma.gnolia, Pointing to the Link’s Ma.gnolia URL

<?php magnolia('BaldTechnologist',10,1,0,0,'History'); ?>

Behind the Scenes

Barry Price built the first version of this plugin, and what you see here is a a modified version of his work the Last RSS Parser, which does much of the heavy lifting. At this point, Alex (BaldTechnologist on Ma.gnolia) has picked up the project and will be adding features as suggestions come in and time allows. If you have an idea, please contact me and I’ll see what I can do!

Contribute, for Free!

It’s easy to support this free plugin, and it won’t cost you a thing! Here are a few simple ways:

• When you plan to buy something from Amazon, follow this link (Amazon.com). It won’t cost you anything, but it will add a small amount of your purchase to my account.
• Write about the Ma.gnolia for WordPress plugin on your site
• Add a link back to my site (www.silverspider.com) from yours
• Drop me a line to say hi and let me know where you are running the plugin.

Changes Made

I’ve made some changes, both major and minor to the plugin, including:

• Changed quote usage from single quotes to double quotes to improve parsing efficiency.
• Improved comments within the script
• Moved the feed parser class (Last RSS) to a separate file for ease of maintenance.
• Various code, formatting and commenting changes

Upcoming Changes

These are not currently prioritized, but I want to add these features/implement these revisions:

• Add CRON abilities to pre-cache feeds instead of waiting for a request
• Add ability to search multiple tags (AND & OR)
• Add the ability to pull from groups in addition to by tags
• Documentation with some examples
• Improve configuration options
• …(this is where your suggestions come in)

Posted in Magnolia Plugin & Tagged: Magnolia, php, Web Development, WordPress

Ma.gnolia & Me

Rick, a great Web Developer with whom I’ve worked in the past, and now count as a friend was kind enough to write about me being a featured linker on Ma.gnolia on his blog, Walking Around. In addittion to the pleasant surprise of seeing my name show up in the feed for his site, it was great to see that Rick has rediscovered Ma.gnolia, as I think it is a rockin’ tool that I hope lives up to his needs.

Speaking of tools, Barry Price, the creator of the Ma.gnolia plugin for WordPress has set its development aside and has encouraged me to adopt the project. As I use the plugin heavily on this site, and I enjoy development, I decided to take him up on the offer and have begun tweaking the plugin, with a goal of releasing a new version (likely 1.3) in the next week. The changes will be minor, but there are some features that I look forward to including in the near future. If you have any requests, please drop me a line!

Update

I’ve posted version 1.3 of the Ma.gnolia plugin.

Posted in Magnolia Plugin & Tagged: Magnolia, Web Development, WordPress