Archive for June 13th, 2008

Seesmic’s WordPress plugin


For those of you who aren’t aware, Seesmic is an online video chat tool designed to facilitate multi-user asynchronous discussions. It has quite a passionate and loyal userbase, which seems to be expanding every day and in some ways marks a new generation in use of online video.

Of particular interest is their plugin offering. After a relatively quick installation process bloggers are able to enable video commenting in addition to that of text. Users who read blog posts and wish to comment on them are then given the option to include either a standard text comment or record a video. Selecting record video comment spawns an embedded video window within the page, where they can even create a new Seesmic account if they don’t already have one.

Once they are satisfied with their comment (you can do multiple takes if desired), the video is displayed in the comments area along with the text comments.

Through its incorporation with another application known as Disqus, this plugin is available for several different blog platforms including Blogger/Blogspot, and notably Wordpress. In the case of Disqus this requires the ability to make changes to the blog template.

Unfortunately WordPress.com, which is what I use to power this blog, does not currently support the plugin - either in its standalone form or in conjunction with Disqus - so I’m not currently able to offer this functionality here. I have installed Disqus on my other blog, which is hosted by blogspot, and have had great results from it. So I’ve been trying to set up a WordPress testbed on my home server to evaluate the standalone Seesmic plugin.

Unfortunately so far I’ve been unsuccessful in my installation attempts, and would like to ask for help from anyone who has had success in the installation of this plugin on WordPress.

The Problem

So far I’ve followed the instructions as outlined on the Seesmic Wiki, which instruct users to:

  1. Download the Seesmic plugin
  2. Unzip the file to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. If you are uploading to your plugins directory, be sure to upload the entire seesmic-wp-plugin directory (not simply the individual files).
  3. Enable the plugin in your dashboard.
  4. If you would like to allow people to post a video reply w/out creating a Seesmic account, visit Settings > Seesmic Comments and check Allow anonymous video comments.

I’ve performed the first 2 steps, however when going to the Pluging Management area in the WordPress Dashboard I find the plugin is not displayed. So I’m unable to complete the remaining 2 steps.

I have assumed that by “be sure to upload the entire seesmic-wp-plugin directory” the instructions call for uploading of both the _MacOSX folder as well as the WordPressPlugin directory. Is that right?

I’ve read something about having to enable cURL as well, however this was listed on a non-affiliated blog; so I’m not sure whether it’s true or not.

For the record I’ve managed to install other plugins successfully, so the WP installation I’m using seems to be ok.

I’ve discussed things in a bit more detail on a video I sent through to Seesmic:

“Installation of Seesmic WP Plugin?” - http://seesmic.com/videos/kb75byx0mu

I’ve also added my experiences to a previously reported instance of the issue on the Get Satisfaction website. If you have had - or are having - similar issues with this I encourage you to provide your thoughts and input there as it seems to be the designated support channel for Seesmic.

As soon as I get this figured out I’ll post the solution here.

The Solution

After a tremendous swell of assistance and support from the Seesmic community I have discovered the source of the installation problem and it seems to be related to something in the new version of the Seesmic plugin (version 0.1.3).

Thanks to John in particular for pointing out the fact that version 0.1.1 does work,  I downloaded version 0.1.1 and copied it to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and found the option was now available.  Once activated I was able to post several video messages, which were then made available in the comments area.

Note that there are two sub-folders within the seesmic-wp-plugin_0.1.1.zip, _MACOSX and WordPressPlugin.   You only need to copy the contents of ONE of these to the plugins directory depending on your OS.  My dev server is GNU/Linux based (Ubuntu) and I used the WordPressPlugin folder; I suspect this folder should also be used for Windows Servers.  If you copy the whole folder - multiple folder levels and all - it’s not going to work.

Final Thoughts

This experience was a fantastic example of what Seesmic is capable of - particularly with regards to the community spirit that surrounds it.  My first post was at 8 am this morning, and in the span of 3.5 hours I received 15 responses from some very thoughtful people - all of which combined to solve my problem.  This is in stark contrast to the fact my post to the official support channel for the Seesmic Plugin at Get Satisfaction received not one response in that same time.

For the full thread of the discussion please see my final clip - http://seesmic.com/videos/NQgM7aTAIM - , select view thread (beneath the clip) and the related clips will load in the left-hand side of the page.

References:

Friday, June 13th, 2008

blogs, digital media, social software 3 Comments