Socialize Me: Update your status in Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn and others from Lotus Connections via ping.fm

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Update your status in Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn and others from Lotus Connections via ping.fm

Back in May, I told you about how I had created a custom plugin to update your Lotus Connections status from ping.fm. After reading your comments and the ones left in my internal blog, I decided there had to be a different approach. That's when I modified an existing Adobe AIR application to microblog both in Twitter and Lotus Connections from the same place. That microblogging application has taken off inside IBM and I can see a LOT of IBMers are using it.. (I can tell because I see RT's from Twitter in Lotus Connections and vice versa).

Talking to one of my favorite customers, they still had a need to just update their status in multiple sites from a single place. Brainstorming some more with them we agreed that a good approach would be create a widget that simply pushes the status update to Lotus Connections and ping.fm at the same time.

So off I went and created a new iWidget for Lotus Connections.

When placed in the Lotus Connections homepage (or wherever an iWidget can live), end users can very easily update their status in Lotus Connections and in ping.fm, which would in turn update the status in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the other sites that the end user has configured.

Very cool, huh? The widget can be installed just like any other widget. The only extra step that you need to do is configure the AJAX proxy:

Go to: <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/config\cells\<cellname>\LotusConnections-config
Save a copy of proxy-config.tpl
Open proxy-config.tpl with your favorite text editor
Look for the following line:

Just after that line insert the following code

<proxy:policy url="http://api.ping.fm/*" acf="none">
 <proxy:actions>
  <proxy:method>GET</proxy:method>
  <proxy:method>POST</proxy:method>
 </proxy:actions>
 <proxy:headers>
  <proxy:header>User-Agent</proxy:header>
  <proxy:header>Accept.*</proxy:header>
  <proxy:header>Content.*</proxy:header>
  <proxy:header>Authorization.*</proxy:header>
 </proxy:headers>
 <proxy:cookies>
  <proxy:cookie>JSESSIONID</proxy:cookie>
 </proxy:cookies>
</proxy:policy>

Save and close the file
Restart the Lotus Connections homepage

And that's it! The widget URL is http://blog.lbenitez.com/widgets/ping.fm/pingFmWidget.xml or if you want to download it and host it locally on your server, you can do so from here.

Enjoy!
PS. I've only tested the widget in the Lotus Connections 2.5 homepage.