Eric Martindale

As I have mentioned before, I'm in a love affair with Chyrp, which is an up-and-coming platform meant to replace WordPress and work a bit like Tumblr, as a microblogging and lifestreaming service.

One of Chyrp's major draws for me is the Aggregator module, which is included in Chryp 2.0 by default. Mike Crittenden of MergeWeb Fame has covered the use of Chyrp's Aggregator previously, but I figured I'd dive in a bit further and help others in configuring their feeds.

You may also be familiar with StackOverflow, a crowd-sourcing social-media head-bashing awesome site that enables users to ask tech-related questions and get awesome community-approved answers. The same group runs several other sites using the same model, including SuperUser and ServerFault, and they are even releasing their codebase as free and open source as the <a href="http://stackexchange.com/>StackExchange project.

But, onward into the goodies: syndicating your activity on StackOverflow (and the other sites) using Chryp.

The first you'll need is your Activity Feed. To acquire this, visit the "Recent" tab of your user profile and look in the bottom right hand corner: you'll see a link to "user recent activity feed". This is the URL for your activity feed, grab that and let's move on to Chyrp.

In Chyrp, you'll want to add a new aggregate in your Admin panel. Paste your Activity Feed into the "Source URL" box, then configure the remaining settings as follows:

Feather: Link Post Attributes: name: "feed[title]" source: "feed[id]" description: "feed[description]"

Now, assign a "Name" and make sure the correct Author is selected, and click "Update". You're all done! You'll see new content from your feed the next time your aggregates update.

Questions? Comments? Lemme have 'em.

If you notice, I currently display my Foursquare badges over in the right hand side. I'm not sure about how long I'll display them specifically, so here's a screenshot:

I recently received an email inquiring about how I accomplished this. Well, since I use Chyrp, here's how I did it:

1. In includes/controller/Main.php, add the following, somewhere around line 715 (immediately after $this->context["sql_queries"] =& SQL::current()->queries;): // BEGIN Foursquare Badges $cURL = curl_init(); curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.foursquare.com/v1/user.json?badges=1"); curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC); curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "your@email.com:your_password_here"); $strPage = curl_exec($cURL); curl_close($cURL); $foursquare = json_decode($strPage); $badges = $foursquare->user->badges; foreach ($badges as $badge) { $this->context['foursquare_badges'] .= '<img src="'.$badge->icon.'" title="'.$badge->description.'" />'; }
// END Foursquare Badges
2. In themes/your_theme_name/content/sidebar.twig, wherever you want to display your foursquare tags, simply add: <div> <h1>Foursquare Badges</h1> $foursquare_badges </div></code> You can display this wherever you like, in any part of your Chyrp template.