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Ubiquity and Ping.fm

August 29th, 2008 · 14 Comments · Code

I often use Ping.fm to update my status across Twitter and Facebook at the same time instead of logging in to each of them and doing it one after the other — it’s the simple things in life that make it better!

And with the Mozilla Labs Ubiquity project (which I will write more about later), a combination of the two was bound to happen! Presenting, Ping Ubiquity which allows you to post to Ping.fm with just a few keystrokes using the Ubiquity add-on (for Firefox) by Aza Raskin.

Installation

To use it you need to have Ubiquity installed (get it here). To install the Ping.fm commands, go to this page, and Ubiquity should recognize that there are some commands for it on there. You will see a bar across the top that will allow you to ’subscribe’ to the commands by clicking the “Subscribe…” button that appears. Ubiquity will then present you with a confirmation page with a warning that this is an untrusted source. I give you my word that these commands do nothing to violate your privacy, and only work to allow you to post to Ping.fm via Ubiquity. You can look at the source code, too!

You will have to set-up your Ping.fm API key in order to be able to use this application with your account. See the command examples below for how to do this.

Commands

To setup your API key, you can either select the key in the browser and type (in Ubiquity) the following:

pingfm-key this

OR — Copy your key and use the command:

pingfm-key <paste your key here>

You can also clear your saved API key by using the following command and hitting Enter:

pingfm-key-clear

To post to your Ping.fm account, use the following command

pingfm (trigger) <your post here>

For example, to post to Twitter, you would use

pingfm @tt This is an update via Ubiquity and Ping.fm!

Or, to post to Facebook, use

pingfm @fb is amazed at how easy things are now!

Log & Updates

  • September 2, 2008
    • You might get an error when setting your Ping.fm app key with this command. That’s means my API key has not yet been approved for userbase access by the guys over at Ping.fm, so please bear with me. If you can set you app key, then all is well and you can post all you want!
    • Planned feature: Ability to get list of last 5 (or 10?) posted updates from Ping.fm. Would love to get some input on this.
  • August 29, 2008
    • Release. No planned features exist currently. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear about them!

If you’re not sure what Ubiquity is, check out the video below for some examples of what it can do.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Leave a comment below if you have any questions or thoughts about it!

Filed under Code

14 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Zachary // Aug 29, 2008 at 11:27 pm

    Hey Waleed,

    That’s awesome that you wrote this shortcut.

    Ubiquity will not recognize the ping.fm key, however. I know the key works b/c I have it plugged into my Dashboard widget. Any suggestions?

    Thanks again for writing a great command set.

  • 2 Waleed // Aug 30, 2008 at 9:32 am

    Hey Zachary,

    What response do you get from Ubiquity? I have it so that the script first checks that the key is in the right format, and only if it is, the key is sent to Ping.fm to validate. There are different error messages for either case.

    If it says “The key is not valid in format” that means the format check failed. In this case, let me know and I’ll do a version that doesn’t validate the format before sending it in to Ping.fm, and then you can subscribe to that one.

    If it says “Hmm, the key doesn’t seem to be valid.” however, that means the key was sent to Ping.fm and came back with an error. If this is the case, are you sure you got your key from here? For this, validation took place with Ping.fm so I’m not sure why this would happen.

    Also, are you copying/pasting the key or are you using the pingfm-key this command?

    Let me know!

  • 3 Aza Raskin // Aug 31, 2008 at 6:48 am

    Hi Waleed,

    Just wanted to give you a shout to say that this is an awesome command. Thanks for writing it!

    – Aza

  • 4 Waleed // Aug 31, 2008 at 9:50 am

    Hey Aza,

    Thanks for the comment! I’m glad you find it useful! But more than that, you deserve a hearty pat on the back for an amazing idea like Ubiquity.

    It could change the way people interact with the Web — make it easier for non-savvy users and make it more controllable for the power users. You can’t go wrong with a combination like this.

    Thanks for your work, and like I wrote on your blog (in the comments), the Web needs more people like you!

  • 5 Zachary // Sep 2, 2008 at 8:43 pm

    Waleed,

    Thanks for the response to the comment.

    I didn’t look at the computer at all this weekend, then decided to try the Ubiquity key registration again this morning to write down the exact error for you. However. . . it worked! Fantastic. Thanks so much.

  • 6 Waleed // Sep 2, 2008 at 8:48 pm

    Thanks for the update, Zachary!

  • 7 Summer // Sep 8, 2008 at 3:31 am

    This works great. Thanks a lot!

  • 8 derlinzer // Sep 18, 2008 at 5:31 am

    Thanks for the Ubiquity script. Ping.fm works like a charm and there’s one less extension for Firefox to install.

  • 9 Chris Frohoff // Sep 26, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    Awesome; I was in the process of writing the same command when I found this.

    How about as-you-type url shortening?

  • 10 David // Oct 21, 2008 at 6:59 am

    Hi Waleed,

    First of all, thanks for your great job ;).

    I have installed Ubiquity successfully and I’m running some different commands pretty well, but not your command :(. When I write “pingfm-key copy&paste_my_key” or “pingfm-key this” (when I’m inside ping.fm/key), nothing occurs. The key isn’t saved and because of I can’t post messages through ping.fm, when I write “pingfm my_message_here” I get an alert saying: “Your ping.fm API key is required to be able to post. Use the pingfm-key command to set it”.

    Any idea on where can be the problem? I’ll appreciate some help.

    Thanks,
    –
    David

  • 11 Waleed // Oct 21, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    David,

    It seems Ping.fm is having some technical issues at their end — their site is resolving to a parking page because of a domain transfer gone wrong.

    If you try to access http://ping.fm/ directly, can you get their site?

    Also, when you put in your key with the “pingfm-key” command and hit Enter, do you get any error or success message?

  • 12 David // Oct 22, 2008 at 1:00 am

    Thanks for the quick response Waleed! ;)

    It seems that it’s working right now. I didn’t get any error or success message, and I can log into ping.fm and send messages without any problem. I have never seen the parking page.

    Thanks a lot for your command, it’s really usefull! ;)

  • 13 Tyler // Oct 24, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    Awesome plugin for ubiquity, one problem…

    When using the word “This” “That” or “It”, it will replace those words with whatever is in your highlight/copy or whatever page you’re own.

    Any way to fix this so I can use those words in my pingfm messages?

  • 14 Waleed // Oct 24, 2008 at 11:37 pm

    Hey Tyler,

    That’s a “problem” with Ubiquity itself I’m afraid and not exclusive to this command. There is a discussion going on about this issue at Mozilla’s Get Satisfaction forum.

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