With a new My Spot page comes new possibilities. This time around, I’m going to make a concerted effort to actually write in new code and attach a new database backend that pulls from the phpbb database and the users’ accounts on the-spot.net.With this new plan, there will be increased ability to add features and remove features on the user-level…that is to say, you can choose what you want to see on the page.
There will also be some integration to popular social sites right on the My Spot page, like twitter and flickr – community based sites with an API that doesn’t require you to visit their site in order to view content.
Last night, I worked with the twitter.com API and with the RSS reader that I’ve hacked up in PHP, and turned out the twitter stream for the-spot.net’s twitter friends. That will go on the front page of the My Spot page so that everyone on tsn can know what all the other tsn members are twittering about.
The next thing I’m going to be doing with that is working on a way to allow the users to update their twitter status directly from tsn. That’s going to take a bit more work than displaying the feed, but it will be a good challenge.
On the previous version of the site, there was a flickr flash app that showed the new photos from the tsn flickr group. That will be coming back as well.
I’m also going to try to make the User Control Panel more accessible and integrate the Buddy List into the My Spot page so you can see when your favorite posters are online (since the information box at the bottom displays the last X minutes, and not “Currently” online).
I’m still trying to gather new ideas from everyone about what they’d like to see on the page…and I hope to make it modular like that previous My Spot page was so they can just be plugged in to the template based on information in the new database determining whether or not they wish to see that.
if you have any ideas – leave comments, or message me directly.
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Tags: the-spot.net, tsn7, my spot, flickr, twitter, api, programming, hacking, rss, php, tsn, community, integration, mashup
