illumio WordPress Widget

illumio is a desktop RSS reader that matches incoming articles to your interests and shows you the most relevant items. It presents the results using a newspaper metaphor, rendered in the browser. (Full disclosure: I'm on the illumio team). You can find more about illumio in its official website.

illumio is social, allowing you to ask questions to other illumio users and also to make comments on any article you see. Your comments are shown to any other illumio user that reads the article.

illumio provides a widget that shows the last 10 comments a person has made. It shows a snippet of the original article, the comment and a link to see the full article text in the illumio website. You can see this widget at the bottom right of this blog.

I packaged the illumio widget into a WordPress widget, which you can download below (right-click and "save link as" to download):

illumiocomments.php

To use the widget follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you're theme supports Widgets. I was using Hemingway and had to change to HemingwayEx, which supports widgets. BTW, HemingwayEx is nice!

  2. Copy the php file above into your widgets directory.

  3. Enable the widget.

  4. Use the widget placement UI in WordPress admin to place the widget in the right place.

  5. Configure the illumio comments widget. You need to specify the account id of the account whose public comments you want to show. (You can use this widget to show public accounts from any illumio user, but it probably makes the most sense to show your own).


To figure out your own illumio id, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your account in www.illumio.com

  2. Click the My Account link

  3. Mouse over the "My illumio page" banner and look at the status bar. It will show a URL of the form <baseURL>_<accountId>.do. Extract your account id out of this URL, it will be a number.


That's it. Visitors to your blog can now see the last 10 comments you've made on illumio.

Of course, there are other possibilities, like automatically creating blog entries from your illumio comments, serving your comments as an RSS feed, etc. If there's demand for any of these, we can easily add them.

UPDATE (12/05/08). illumio no longer exists. The assets of Tacit Software were purchased by Oracle and illumio was shut down. I replaced the illumio widget with a widget displaying the last items I shared on Google Reader.

Comments

  1. Oh nice. I liked the features of Illumio more than FeedDemon that i am using currently. I might shift to Illumio soon.

    Also, there are many Desktop RSS feed readers and selecting 1 according to your needs is a big task. This leads to the comparison of these feed readers.

    I found a detailed comparison, including Pros & Cons, of some of the best Desktop/Online RSS feed readers here - Comparison of Best Desktop RSS Feed Readers
    &
    Comparison of Best Online RSS Feed Readers

    ReplyDelete

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