As Friendfeed starts to get better and better, and people start to contribute more to the site, users will increasingly want to find ways to export that valuable data back to their own blogs.   After all, if you’re the webmaster of your own blog, your obvious first priority is to drive that traffic back to your own site.   More traffic equals more pageviews and more pageviews equals more Adsense clicks and more RSS subscribers.   So it makes sense that you would want that bustling Friendfeed activity to be moved over to your own domain.

Luckily a couple of Friendfeed users have been hard at work dealing with that very issue and if you have a blog hosted on either Blogger or WordPress, then you are in luck.    The Blogger method is much easier as it is just a simple copy and paste.   The WordPress method has a bit more to it.    But nevertheless, both methods have so far been receiving glowing reviews and I will shortly be installing the WordPress version on my own blog to capture some of that Friendfeed magic for myself.

You can find the Blogger method here and it was designed by Pat Hawks.   He has scripts for both the old and the new Blogger templates and as I said, it’s a simple copy and paste.   Since I haven’t used Blogger since last year, I can’t personally endorse the script and say how good it is.   But he was linked to and praised by Louis Gray so that has to count for something.

Here’s what it apparently looks like.   Plain but functional but far as I’m concerned, functional is all that matters.

Now for the WordPress plugin.   It’s made by Glenn Slaven and it’s like any other WordPress plug-in.   You have to download it, unzip it and upload it to your blog domain.   After activating it, you have to enter your Friendfeed details and configure it.   You then have to go into your WordPress template, to the single page template, and place the <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?> inside the loop so that Friendfeed can match the page with the comments on Friendfeed.

Now here is what it’s supposed to look like :

What I like about it is that you can see the picture of the Friendfeed user, you can also see who “liked” the post and how many people commented on it.   So a lot of information there.

I haven’t been able to find any live blogs with the plug-in though. Glenn says that Corvida was his first live tester but that blog is currently down.   If anybody knows of a blog that is running these plug-ins, please post the link in the comments as I would really like to see the plug-ins in action.

Now what we need next is a way to export Twitter comments whenever you post a link to one of your blog posts on Twitter.    I wonder when someone will come up with that?

Written by Mark O’Neill