What is SMIRC?
Like trackbacks, but not — SMIRC searches and displays content related to your CONTENT, not just posts that link to yours.
SMIRC searches various data sources (Google Blog Search and Twitter) for posts related to your content and displays links/summaries on your page or inside your posts. These links and summaries can be displayed anywhere and any way you wish — below your post, in a sidebar, etc. With the magic animation power of jQuery, SMIRC content can be hidden until a user clicks the customizable header.
SMIRC performs related content searching (at least in this version) by creating RSS feed URLs for the various data sources. The RSS feed is parsed and converted into XHTML for display in your blog.
All PHP is separated into logical classes and files, and all XHTML is standards-compliant. Lists of links, authors, and summaries are built using standard UL and LI tags, and can be modified to fit your theme via two CSS files contained within this plugin.
why was this developed?
Over at Evolution Bureau, we seem to have a knack for creating viral campaigns. I mean, really viral. Elf Yourself, anyone? It’s fun to create these campaigns, but it’s even more interesting to tap into the conversations people have about our work. Of course, after a campaign launch, we search for what folks are saying, but why can’t we show those results on our own website?
Our CEO (Daniel Stein — follow him on Twitter) wanted a way to tap into the discussions about our work and display those discussions on our website. Two days later, this plugin was created.
how is SMIRC installed?
- Upload the SMIRC plugin to your blog (YOURBLOG/wp-content/plugins) and activate it using the Wordpress plugin admin screen.
- Modify settings if necessary. You can modify the following settings:
- Required keyword. SMIRC uses a page’s (or post’s) title as a search term when querying for related content. If your page title contains commonly-used words, results may not be relevant. To help relevancy, you may add a keyword that will always be appended to the search term. In other words, if your page title is “My Portfolio”, and your name is “John”, entering “John” will ensure that searches occur for “My Portfolio” + “John” without changing the title of your page.
- Data sources. SMIRC has the ability to search one or more sources of content. This version includes Twitter and Google Blog Search. You can indicate which sources you’d like to search, and how many results from each source should be displayed. You can also exclude specific URLs and Twitter usernames.
- Header text. To better fit within your existing theme, you can set the text that is displayed above SMIRC’s list of links. During template integration, you can add arguments to the main SMIRC method to show text before and after what you’ve entered in admin.
- Animation. You have two choices: SMIRC will either display the header and list, or display the header with an arrow — clicking the arrow will trigger a sliding animation reveal of the list.
- Add `<?=smirc($post->post_title)?>` in your template where you’d like SMIRC to display content. If you don’t want to use your page title (or post title) as keywords, pass any string you’d like to the smirc() function.
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Hi Husani,
First off, great plugin, I only hope in time you’ll add more services to it
Secondly, I do require some help with it. I have it activated and it appears where I want it to, but despite checking the animate box the entire list always displays. You say this feature requires jQuery, but how do I implement it within my theme? There doesn’t appear to be any info on this (all I’ve got from the WP forums is that to include jQuery you need to create a file and add a call function, but I have no idea how to create the file!).
http://weareblogging.0fees.net/blogs/waw_blog/
Thanks in advance
please help, i can’t get this to work on my wordpress website.
Aby – I’m going to need a little more than that if you want me to help. What, specifically, is happening?
i have configured the smirc options as follows:
title separator -
1.data source: google 4 results, twitter 1 result.
2.saved changes.
3.copied post_title)?> into my pages.
But no results are shown on my pages.
oh, and i copy the string “post_title)?>” into my html but not working instead i see “post_title)?>” on my page.
Not sure if you’re pasting the wrong thing, or if it’s not appearing properly here. The tag to insert into your theme is:
< ?smirc($post->post_title)?>
yes, like you mentioned that is what i used on my pages. But it appears on my pages as the tag i meentioned earlier. no feeds, just half of the tags.
What’s your URL?
[...] Learn more about Husani here. [...]
Hello Husani,
I like the concept, but not sure what you mean by template, because I have lots of php files associated with Wordpress.
Also, I don’t know where exactly I should install jquery and if I need to add a .js reference to particular pages.
Your help would be appreciated!
Thanks,
John Barrow