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Friends plugin direction

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More of an asking if you thought of it, or if it was in the works.. but with the current friends plugin, is there plans to add a better freind’s list that pulls in the feeds of each friens? Kinda like livejournal?

For example, when this (and the other friends list plugin) came out, I kinda assumed that maybe eventually it would go in the direction. Because otherwise, it’s more a buddy list. :disappointed:

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:34:02
  • Andrew
    • Champion of Loops

    Hi Andrea,

    There’s not really anything “in the works” for the friends plugin, but that’s just because no one has requested anything.

    I’ll take a look at adding this feature. We’re you thinking along the lines of a widget or “friends page” like Live Journal?

    Thanks,

    Andrew

  • Luke
    • The Crimson Coder

    I hadn’t really thought about this either. I’ve always thought of it just like a buddy list, with an avatar and a little bit of link candy.

    However, why not have the option for a full page that could show the last 5 entries from each friend?

    Then again, if you have lots of friends, it could get messy fast.

    50 friends? that’s 50 different feeds to cache and read. Per blog, per click (although cache is called all but one time every so often).

    Maybe if it had like a 24 hr cache on it or something, that wrote the output to a static cache file? Rebuilding of course when new friends are added?

  • andrea_r
    • The Incredible Code Injector

    I was totally thinking a friend’s page like LJ. (or eljay if you like – why yes, I do have one thanks, but little angst…:wink:

    Sure, I bet it could get huge on a large system, but limits and caches are great, right? I can tell you LJ limits it to show the last 20 friend’s posts on a page. If you don’t get to it, I’m thinking of doing this myself on my own system.

    (what with all the free time I have not helping out on that other forum. :smiley: )

  • James Farmer
    • Founder & Chair (honest)

    I’ve always argues that the dashboard is an ideal place to put an aggregator for people who are new to this kinda stuff (must be my Userland roots :slight_smile: and I guess that providing feed titles (a la aggr) of friends to the dashboard area… and allowing people to add / remove other feeds too, would be pretty cool (just thinking outloud here though mostly).

  • Luke
    • The Crimson Coder

    Depends on your point of view, Andrew. But it was very poorly coded to begin with, and didn’t make very good use of queries or data.

    It was running a couple queries for each friend in your list, etc, when it could have skipped all of that and just used their username instead.

    Plus there wasn’t much in the way of display options either. I ended up looking at it, and rewriting it. Adding in quite a bit of things for it, etc. It’s been probably 8 months since I’ve looked at it, so I might be a little off, but I do remember quite well that it was definitely not coded well, and also used more resources than it needed to.

    Not that I’m knocking the effort of whoever it was that did it, but it needed some serious work.