Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

Ping Fire, a Firefox extension for Ping.fm, can now be found at http://www.pingfire.us. All new versions and announcements will be posted there.

If you’ve downloaded Ping Fire from this site in the past seven days you will want to check http://www.pingfire.us to ensure that you’re running the most recent version. 

Well that was quick!  The people at Ping have approved Ping Fire.  I’m going to consider the extension in beta mode as only two people have looked at it.

If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to email me or post a comment.

Installation Instructions

1. Download and Install PingFire.
2. Add the “Ping” button to a menu.  You can do this by going to View >> Toolbars >> Customize.
3. Provide the extension with your Application Key.  (You can find your key by going to: http://ping.fm/key.) From within Firefox, go to Tools >> Add-Ons.  Find “Ping Fire” in the list then click the “Preferences” button. Enter your User Name and your Application Key into the fields provided then click “Ok.”

Ping Fire is ready for open testing.  I’ve been using it these past few days with no problems.  The download link is below.  Unfortunately, I still need to get Ping’s blessing before the application will work for anyone but me.

Installation Instructions

1. Download and Install PingFire.
2. Add the “Ping” button to a menu.  You can do this by going to View >> Toolbars >> Customize.
3. Provide the extension with your Application Key.  (You can find your key by going to: http://ping.fm/key.) From within Firefox, go to Tools >> Add-Ons.  Find “Ping Fire” in the list then click the “Preferences” button. Enter your User Name and your Application Key into the fields provided then click “Ok.”

Editor’s Note: About an hour after this post the people at Ping let me know that PingFire was approved! So now everyone can use it.  Just remember that the plug-in is still in beta.

What a busy few days!  I started development on Ping Fire, my first FF Extension, on Saturday afternoon. It’s late Tuesday night and I think it’s a good time to provide some updates.

PingFire is working.  You can now post using all of the different “Ping My” types (Default, Blog, MicroBlog and Status) as well as any custom triggers you have created.

You can also quote something you’re reading on the web with Ping Fire.  Simply select the text you want to quote and hit the “Ping” button.  Ping Fire will automatically copy the text you’ve selected, append the URL and add it to the message box.  All you have to do is hit the “Ok” button.

I figure this puts PingFire in an un-official Beta status.  The status is still un-official since I haven’t gotten PingFire approved yet.  I submitted the stripped down version on Monday night so I’m hoping that it’ll get approved soon.  I’m also hoping that I don’t have to go through another submission round to get all of the new features I approved.

In the grand scheme of Firefox Extensions, PingFire is relatively simple but I’m still proud of how far I’ve come since Saturday.  When I started this project I knew some Javascript, knew some XML and I had never heard of XUL. Now it’s three days later and I’m still by no means a pro but I think that I’ve come a long way. I hope everyone enjoys the extension as much as I enjoyed developing it.

Often times I will be reading Twitter, Pownce, etc and will want to post something. So I have to navigate to Ping and write my post. This is tiresome for me because that means I have to open another tab when I already some many open. Enter Ping Fire.

Ping Fire will a Firefox extension that allows a user to post a Ping without having to be on their Ping.fm Dashboard.

Initially, the only thing the extension will allow you to do is post to Ping. I will add new features as I find a new or when someone requests a feature that I feel will be useful.

The extension is still in the beginning phase.  I have the extension running in Firefox along with most of the necessary windows and Javascript.  I’m still waiting on my API key from Ping.fm before I can work on the rest of it.

If you’d like to make a feature request add a comment here.

While working on a side project of mine, I decided that I wanted to allow users to authenticate themselves using OpenId. Being a Java programmer, who is reluctant to re-invent the wheel, I immediately searched Google in hopes that someone had already created a Java library I could use. After a few moments I came across OpenId4Java. These guys created a wonderful product which made implementation a breeze. It’s also worth noting that the support is pretty amazing as well.

After playing around with the code a little bit, I noticed that the sample code didn’t play too well with my Struts application. So I wrapped their code into my own class OpenIdAuthenticator. This class simply wraps the logic from the sample code to make it compatible with Struts.

Feel free to use the class for any purpose - commercial, private, etc. If you so desire, please give me some credit somewhere in the Javadoc.

I’m starting a new project named Pownce Feed. A service similar to Twitter Feed. It will allow users to post to their Pownce account using RSS feeds from other web sites. If you’re interested check out PownceFeed.com. Note: As of 11/17 we’re looking for developers! If you’d like to help, simply sign-up for an account on the website and check the Developer box.