Greg Tracy

I opened the New York Times yesterday and said to myself, "I've seen this picture before." A tech leader hovering over a laptop with his child. Granted, I'm no Scott McNealy and Sharendipity is no Sun Microsystems. But I hope to see many more pictures like this in which technologists are using their craft to make education better.

   

Click here to download:

i-ve-seen-that-picture-before-DrGgbHJkIirqoouIehmD.zip (168 KB)

"$200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math" -- Ashlee Vance, New York Times. Photo credit: PeterDaSilva.

"Sharendipity aims to help Web creators of all ages" -- Kathleen Gallager, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Photo credit: Joe Koshollek.

If you've ever wanted to display a photo slideshow of your Posterous media inside your Facebook feed, here's your chance.

Sharendipity recently released support for an embedded play mode for Facebook feeds. That means you can play interactive content - like a slideshow or game - directly from the feed. You no longer need to link out to a different page. You can read the full story on the Sharendipity blog.

Here's how I did it...

1. Create the slideshow app
Using one of the easy wizards, you can customize existing Posterous apps and make them your own. There are a couple to choose from, but in this example, I used the simple slideshow template that transitions through all photo media in a particular Posterous.

2. Share your slideshow from the app page
You can share your new application in one of two ways. You can either use the built-in Facebook share functionality that can be accessed by clicking on the Facebook icon on the app's homepage. Or you can copy the app's URL and use Facebook's post feature to post it by hand.

3. Post it to your Facebook feed
If you choose the "post" option by copying the app's URL, simply paste it into the text box on your Facebook news feed or profile wall. Facebook will automatically recognize it and insert the applications icon.

4. Feed preview mode
When the story appears on your wall or your friends' news feed, it will look just like a video post. The icon will have a blue play button to get it started.

5. Feed viewing mode
As is the case with videos, when you or a friend play the app, it will auto-expand in place and the slideshow (or game) will start!

Go get started...

Filed under  //   posterous   sharendipity  

This implementation of the Posterous API uses the new Google Translate Text-to-Speech capability to announce the photos being shown. Good fun!

Want your own? Use this wizard to customize your Posterous slideshow.

UPDATE: There appears to be a problem with the audio for Mac users. Feel free to comment on your experience and configuration below if you're a Mac user. It will help Sharendipity track the problem down. Thanks!

UPDATE: The audio will work for Firefox users regardless of OS.

Sharendipity + YouTube Data API = Creative Goodness

Sharendipity is an awesome way to tap into your favorite web services. I tapped the YouTube API to create this fun little TV showing the Muppets Studio videos.

Want your own TV? Go create your own and set the channel and skin and then embed it on your site. Interested in something else? Let me know - I'm always looking for fun projects to work on.

What I'd really like to do (some day) with the Posterous API is build a Brizzlyesque client for surfing Posterous blogs. But given the complete lack of free time in my life, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

But... I can whip out applications using the API inside of Sharendipity with remarkable ease. I've shown this before with games, slideshows, and other general goodness.

This time I created a widget that lets you take your entire Posterous anywhere. This widget has a nice vertical scroll effect to navigate all of your posts. Each post can be seen in its entirety if you click on the entry's panel.

Want your own? Use the customizer and configure your own Posterous hostname. Then use the embed code to insert your Posterous content anywhere!
 

 
Thanks to Dale for creating the Sharendipity framework for this widget.

Building on top of the Posterous API, I created a simple memory game that uses the image media in my Posterous posts.

 Want your own? Go here and set your Posterous hostname, and embed your game anywhere.

As I mentioned earlier, it's pretty easy to access the Posterous API from within Sharendipity. Not only can you take advantage of the Posterous wizard to build your own embeddable widget that streams your photos, but you can also build your own Posterous applications from scratch!

I've published the core components used in the original slideshow widget which means you can operate with a new layer of abstraction that removes the need to understand how their API operates under the hood. Just search the explorer for "posterous" and you'll find the following components that can be reused by simply dragging them into your application.

• Posterous Service - blog reader is the primary web service component that interfaces with the reading API. This service has one method, getPosts(), which will return an array of blog posts. When you initially use the service, you will be prompted to identify the Posterous you'd like to read. This value - along with the number of posts to read - can be configured programatically as well.

• Posterous Blog Post is a data structure that encapsulates the post elements returned by the Posterous API. This includes the title, description, post date, an array of media elements, etc.

• Posterous media is a data structure that encapsulates the media elements returned by the Posterous API. Currently, this data structure only supports the media of type "image".

Currently, these three components all work together. The getPosts() method of the Posterous Service - blog reader service will return an array of Posterous Blog Post objects and each of these may contain an array of Posterous media objects.

I'm hoping to add support for video and sound elements as well, but right now there are some limitation within Sharendipity for how these are played. Send me your thoughts and let me know how you'd like to access your Posterous outside of their website.

I love APIs. And I have a particular affinity for using APIs within Sharendipity applications. Garry, Sachin, and the fine team here at Posterous have a great API for posting and reading from your Posterous.
 
I took advantage of the reading API by creating an embeddable widget that streams my Posterous photos.

Would you like to create your own embeddable Posterous widget? You can use this Sharendipity wizard to personalize the stream for your own Posterous and take your Posterous media anywhere on the web!