I’ve just released my first plugin ever for MT. This is ActionStreams-Blogcritics, a plugin that pulls your Blogcritics posts into Mark Paschal’s brilliant ActionStreams plugin for MT. Incidentally, it also works with ActionStreams Version 1.1-Alpha
Get it here. It’s freeware, and there is a documentation file that explains installation and usage.
ActionStreams is pure genius.
I mean that. Seriously. Every which way you look at it. The idea behind it: automatically pull information about all your activity on the Net and put it one place. The way it’s been done, with such elegance, speed, economy and lightness of code. Ok, so it may have a few bugs, but it’s really one of those breakthrough plugins.
It’s a Black Swan event … now that’s from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan in which he argues that seemingly random, totally unpredictable events that are considered improbable in the current received wisdom have a disproportionate impact in their field and beyond.
Of course Taleb is talking about history and economics. But much the same is true here at MT. To my mind, there have been only two Black Swan plugins: Kevin Shay’s Right Fields and Mark Paschal’s ActionStreams. Neither was a mere workaround or solution to an existing problem. Both came out of nowhere, with no antecedent or precursor, displayed a breathtaking leap of imagination and effected a radical change in the way we use (even perceive) MT. It’s sad that we don’t have RightFields for MT4+.
An aside: It is unfair to compare Arvind Satyanarayan’s CustomFields (now bundled with MTPro)with RightFields. CustomFields is totally brilliant, but it is in many ways a descendant of RightFields. Back in the days before MT4, with all its bells and whistles and asset-management, RightFields did everything that CustomFields later went on to do, and more. RightField’s “LinkedEntry field” functionality is totally awesome. It is only recently being deployed in PHP over at ExpressionEngine, in a sort of souped-up plugin from solspace that combines a free or tag search with a LinkedEntry paradigm.
RightFields and ActionStreams stand alone. There must be a different universe for them. More than any other single plugin I can think of, they showed us the possibility of the improbable.
MT is never going to be the same again.
AS is a combine harvester.
It grabs everything you want it to grab. With all the online services available today, whether they’re blogs, websites, seeds, articles, whatever, you sign up, put in your name and AS tracks what you’re doing and spits out the result. No more copy-pasting of Javascript code that might or might not work or might or might not be updated and might or might not leave ugly error spaces at 12 midnight so you get a heart attack the next morning when you look at your page.
AS’s documentation isn’t complete by any means, and it doesn’t address itself to any principle of design or usability (and no reason it should). The temptation then is to pull every single thing and have it displayed.
I think this is utterly and totally wrong. AS simply gives you options. Pulling everything is not a viable option. If we are to design attractive, meaningful pages that draw viewers and readers, we need to exercise restraint and make intelligent choices. Banging in every little bit of trivia is not an intelligent choice. It is, in fact, guaranteed to put people off.
The default template code is only a demonstration of AS’s capabilities. I don’t believe it’s meant for real-world deployment. I dislike intensely the “noisiness” and chatter it generates. It makes pages looks terribly busy.
Also, I find that muddling these streams is really messy. I like the idea of separating the content otherwise than by date; ideally, by stream. That makes it easier to position constantly updating events on your pages. You could, for instance, in a three-column setup, have one sidebar with just your books and music, and in another, perhaps slightly larger, sidebar, some photos from Flickr or Smugmug or whatever. There are some excellent examples by Richard Benson, some based on Mark Paschal’s own Order plugin. I can’t believe that Order was written without precisely this realization—the need to sort content—in mind.
But it all depends on your approach and your audience. If you think your viewers are going to be interested in every single thing you’ve done, then by all means put it out.
More likely, though, you will hook a viewer and have him come back to your site if you give him something of substance. And to do that effectively, you do have to organize the material.
And that means you do have to get your hands dirty and modify the default template code.