Screenshot of FBSL on LondonFuse.ca

FBSL is designed to be used quite intuitively, this screenshot shows the FBSL status form as themed by Thomas Cermak on LondonFuse.

FBSL status update form

FBSL can be used out of the box, though you can customize it from the settings page. All other information (installation, usage, and changelog) can be found inside the packaged module which is available for download here.

This module has been sponsored by Thomas Cermak of LondonFuse.

Resources:

• Project Page (Download): http://drupal.org/project/facebook_link

Note: Feature and Support requests should be made through the Facebook-style Links Forum. I may not be able to answer them here.

[Google Reader (with thumbnails) can be imitated on a Drupal site by using Feeds, Feeds Image Grabber, FileField, ImageField, ImageCache, ImageAPI and Views module].

How it works
A classic method of mimicking the behavior of Feeds Image Grabber would be to do the same thing manually. Let us go through the procedure if you were to do it manually:

1. Refresh the feed to create nodes for feed items (using FeedsNodeProcessor).
2. For each feed-item, go to their respective webpage and save the image to display.
3. Upload the image to CCK image field for each feed item.

Feeds Image Grabber automates the last 2 steps of the three step process described. Imagecache module can be used to create thumbnail of the image retrieved which can be attached to the node.

What’s in the box
On 3rd March, first version of FIG was released. As of today, FIG supports following features:

1. Automatically downloads and attaches image to the node created by Feeds module.
2. Configurable XPath of the desired image location on the webpage of the feed item on per feed basis (using element’s id or CSS class).
3. Support for FileField Paths module.
4. Configurable maximum image size.
5. Configurable minimum and maximum image resolutions.

Get involved
You can get involved by doing any of the following:

1. write about this module, so that other folks can find it.
2. report bugs in the issue queue.
3. help in the support forums of the module.
4. buy me a Beer

Resources:

• Project Page (Download): http://drupal.org/project/feeds_imagegrabber
• Tutorials: http://publicmind.in/blog/tutorial-for-feeds-image-grabber

Note: Feature and Support requests should be made through the Feeds Image Grabber Forum. I may not be able to answer them here.

WP ShareThisPost includes the following sharing and bookmarking sites, by default:

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Google Bookmarks
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Technorati

Go through the readme.txt file to know how you can customize WP ShareThisPost to include more of your favorite sharing and bookmarking sites.

WP ShareThisPost, by default, only adds the sharing and bookmarking links at the end of posts. You can see the readme.txt file to see how you can change that to include pages, archives, feeds, etc.

Installation

Upload the unzipped folder into the plugins folder of your wordpress installation (usually /wp-content/plugins), activate it and you are ready to go. You will see the desired links below each of your posts:

WP ShareThisPost

Styling

I use this CSS to style my WP ShareThisPost, adapt as you wish of course by changing the wp_sharethispost.css file:

Introduction

FeedAPI Imagegrabber is a add-on module for FeedAPI. It consists of a parser which visits the original URL of a new feed item, and retrieves the main image from the post. Once the main image has been retrieved, it is then converted into a thumbnail using the ImageCache module, and stored in the node created by FeedAPI, inside a CCK field.

The purpose of FeedAPI Imagegrabber is to make the feed more informative as well as interesting for the user. As, we all know that “comics are much better than novels”, this module appends the feed-item with an appropriate image from its content URL. The goal of the module is to mimic the thumbnail display of websites such as digg.com. This goal is acheived by using FeedAPI to turn RSS feed-items into nodes, and then using FeedAPI Imagegrabber to append these nodes with an appropriate image from the feed-item’s webpage.

How it works

A classic method of mimicking the behavior of FeedAPI Imagegrabber will be to do the same thing manually. Let us go through the procedure if you were to do it manually:

1. Refresh the feed.
2. For each feed-item, go to their respective original URL and save the image to display.
3. Crop the image, convert it into a thumbnail and then upload it in an CCK Image field.

FeedAPI Imagegrabber automates the last 2 steps of the three step process described. It uses cURL to download the images and then crop them using Imagecache. Then the image is stored into the CCK Imagefield. The most difficult part which only humans can do is to select the image,  for which I am constantly improving on the heuristics.

Download and Install

Visit the project page : FeedAPI Imagegrabber

Features and Future Releases

Visit the project page : FeedAPI Imagegrabber

History

I understand history is boring, but it is only for those who think the other way round. I started working on this module during December 2008.  At the time, when I started working on this module, I had a little or say no idea about Drupal or its API. It took me quite some time to get used to it and start working on the module. In the Initial release, I thought of very simple heuristics and decided to select the largest image available on the web-page. I completed the module in about 1 month and was very happy with my performance, and then a big blow came which delayed the release of FeedAPI Imagegrabber by 2 months. I had to include an external BSD licensed script for converting relative URL’s to absolute URL’s but Drupal denied to accept this. They said they allow only GPL licensed code and I started to convince them that both licenses are compatible. Unfortunately, I was unable to convince them and I had to create an external link to that BSD script on sourceforge. And now, the module is released with the hope to enhance the visitor-experience on several websites around the globe.

You may find these posts useful:

Tutorial for FeedAPI ImageGrabber
PHP: Relative URL to Absolute URL
Open Source Software and Licenses

Do Leave your comments to let me know what you think.

Note: Support queries and requests should be made through the FeedAPI Imagegrabber Forum. I may not be able to answer them here.

Now, if you need to access a file whose relative URL and base URL are known, you must combine them to create an absolute URL.

The RFC URL specification defines an “absolutize” algorithm for combining an absolute base URL with a relative URL to create a new absolute URL. This algorithm was already implemented and I found the PHP script for the algorithm at nadeausoftware.com. I have created a project UrlToAbsolute at sourceforge, as I needed to use it in my several open source projects including FeedAPI ImageGrabber, Facebook-style Links and Feeds Image Grabber. As the original script was released under BSD License, it was pretty easy to fork it. Here is the link to the project UrlToAbsolute. You can also look at the step by step explanation of the script here.

Usage Instructions

Extract the script (url_to_absolute.php) into your web directory, include it into your current php file using:

then, you can convert the relative url to absolute url by calling:

It return false on failure, otherwise returns the absolute url. If the $relativeUrl is a valid absolute url, it is returned without any modification.

Related resources:

• Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/absoluteurl
• Original article: http://nadeausoftware.com/articles/2008/05/php_tip_how_convert_relative_url_absolute_url