AJ Henderson AJ's Blog

So after three or four days of work, it looks like I finally have a working system.  I can now post from my Galaxy S to my blog and have that send notifications to Facebook, Twitter and The City.  For those curious in the details, I’m running the latest WordPress, PHP and MySQL for the site with the Janrain Engage, Twitter Tools (slightly modified to get #tc hashing working from Android client posts) and Wordbooker for plugins.

Janrain Engage and Gigya were in pretty close running, but I liked the integrated Share ability of the Janrain plugin.  Gigya would be better for a larger site as it is definitely a slicker back end, but it lacked the front end simplicity that I was looking for for this project.  Both systems provide integrated authentication from a number of different social networks and web sites like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AIM, Flicker, etc.  They also both offer the ability for users to share your posts under their own accounts directly from the site, however Gigya required an additional step to setup.  Both are free for non-commercial purposes at low usage levels (sub 1000 unique visitors a month).

Twitter Tools directly integrates with Twitter’s API and handles Twitter posting when new blog posts come in.  I had to modify it a little because the hash tags plugin was not adding hash tags when posting from the Android client (and presumably any other WordPress API using client).  I have submitted the bug so hopefully the hack won’t be necessary soon.  Currently I just have it hardcoded to always add #tc to posts to push to The City using The City’s Twitter integration.  (For those who are not familiar, The City is a private social networking platform for churches run by Zondervan.)

Wordbooker hooks in to Facebook Connect and handles both pushing status and wall updates for posts as well as pulling back comments from the wall post on an hourly basis.  Note that if you try it out, I have comment approval required still so it might not show up even after an hour since I might not be watching my phone for comment notifications.

So yeah, with that project done and out of the way, now I get to move straight in to updating my World of Warcraft mod since they just released the 4.0.1 client today… wish they could have waited another month or so, but oh well, life goes on.  At least I have another great developer helping on that project and I get paid (I’ll be it about $1.50 a week (go profit sharing) and guaranteed Beta invites for WoW expansions.) for something I’d do anyway.