I thought it would be nice to add a Nike+ widget to this blog, so I did a bit of searching. It didn’t take long to find the cool Nike+ WordPress Plugin by Mark Rickert. However, upon installing and configuring it, I found it failed during the curl authentication calls with:
Can not retrieve data from Nike.com.
Error: there is no user information in the request
No worries, my Nike+ data is publicly accessible, so this type of authentication is really unnecessary and only slows the retrieval time. So I edited the plugin code (nikePlus.php) to change from using up-front authentication to passing my ID on each call.
While I was in there, I also did a bit of customization and cleanup: removed unimportant details, tweaked heading levels, trimmed some things to improve performance, etc. But I deliberately kept it simple. That’s the beauty of these plug-ins: they’re easy to customize and tune. Scroll down to the “Nike+ Stats” and “Recent Runs” in the right-hand column and you’ll see it.
Hats off to Mark for a handy plugin which not only was a nice add to this site, but sparked my interest in possible further Nike+ coding.
