The good folks at 30 Boxes have gone and created one of the coolest WordPress plugins I’ve seen in a long while. Narendra gave me a sneak peek of it at WordCamp 2006 and I was very excited. Now it’s available to all 30 Boxes users and you can see a screenshot of my Buddy Card on the feature page.
Buddy Cards are a Web 2.0 social calendar site’s solution to the problem of truncated identity in blog comments. Where your comments would have a mere link to the URL you provide, they can now link to a centralized profile page with a rich set of features including buddy pics (a.k.a. gravatars) and automatic buddy harvesting from other places like Flickr.
My description surely fails. Buddy Cards are a visual and interactive thing. Head over to a recent post on my personal blog to see Buddy Cards in action.
Installing the Buddy Cards plugin on your WordPress blog is easy: get the plugin; unzip and upload it to your plugins directory; activate. (This plugin is not available for WordPress.com blogs at this time.)
I am not involved with the development of this plugin; I just think it’s cool. If you have bug reports or support questions, please bring them to the 30 Boxes Forums.
November 3, 2006 at 2:17 pm |
i saw this on chris messina’s blog. it seems reasonably cool, although it’ll be interesting to see how they deal with the issues gravatar has (high load times for comment-ful pages, no authentication (anyone who knows your email can have your avatar))
November 3, 2006 at 4:26 pm |
[...] Thanks to Andy Skelton for pointing out Buddy Cards from 30 Boxes. Buddy Cards looks to be big improvement over Gravatars (with plenty of AJAX goodness) [...]
November 3, 2006 at 5:19 pm |
Adam,
We aren’t serving the avatars and hoping the distributed nature will avoid bottlenecks. The actual Buddy Card info is also cached in intervals to make the implementation snappy.
Oh, and the service has authentication built in! If you choose to “Verify” the comment then you can either do an email authentication or authenticate with a 30 Boxes account. The nice thing is that this works accross blog instances and for 30 Boxes users, your comments are tracked on your Buddy Page (ala CoComment).
November 3, 2006 at 6:16 pm |
[...] “The good folks at 30 Boxeshave gone and created one of the coolest WordPress plugins I’ve seen in a long while.” -Andy Skelton (one of the top WordPress and now WordPress.com wizards) [...]
November 3, 2006 at 11:36 pm |
Andy,
I installed the plugin with no issues, and it seems to be running just fine, on WP 2.1 Alpha 3, no less!
November 4, 2006 at 1:29 am |
very interesting. serving avatars from flickr by default. yes, truthiness requires verification, but displaying avatars doesn’t. i’d like a few more switches on the options panel, so that i can control who gets avatars (either restricting to verified commenters, or to certain truthiness levels).
also, i’m sure it’s disconcerting to some that their myspace profiles are linked _unless they opt out_. it would probably be better to leave all the links off unless a person creates a card and enables them.
good stuff.
November 14, 2006 at 1:30 pm |
So vCards have officially been reinvented?
That’s awesome… (and awfully annoying).
November 14, 2006 at 2:40 pm |
VxJasonxV: I don’t think this supplants vCards at all. Actually the hCard format would be nice for comments but for the non-publishing of email addresses.