MySpace Friends Plugin

Neat!

So a few days ago I decided to put some attention on retrieving MySpace friends lists and rendering them for appropriate display on WordPress pages such as this. For a while I considered page scraping, than I considered MySpaceIM, than I considered page scraping using an XML parser tweaked for rendering messy HTML.

All of those ideas would have worked fine, except MySpaceIM that is. After some research into MySpaceIM’s chat protocol, it does not appear to show a list of friends and images unless they too participate in MySpaceIM, useless for now.

But wait! Why reinvent the wheel? After some searching on Google I found that many people had already written rudimentary API’s. The API I decided to use can be found at:

http://foafr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5

This API had more functionality than I needed so I stripped it quite a bit, then I rewrote much it to both clean it up and render it work better for my needs. The API now connects to MySpace and downloads a friends list, saves it to a MySQL database along with a timestamp (so as not to bombard MySpace). The data in the MySQL database is returned providing it is still considered fresh enough to be valid. My database is refreshed only if it is three hours old.

After all of that, I threw together a WordPress widget and stuck it on Mine and my Wife’s pages, and tested it on Firefox and Internet Explorer.

To the author of the original API: Great job!

To anybody that would like the source of the Widget and modified API, please leave me a comment (give your email address) and I will consider posting the source code.

 

Mike