Was saving down facebook data into a database from the graph api, wanted to save the urls in a mixed url table but didn’t want to bother saving the whole http://www.facebook.com every time, what a waste of data. Initially I lazily abbreviated this too: fb.com/whateverthepagewas, left the acquisition stuff to its job and then went off to do something else. Coming back to the management system I accidentally clicked one of these fb.com/ links, and it worked! Facebook have set it up as a redirect. Maybe this was common knowledge but I hadn’t heard of it before…Anyhow a useful biproduct of dataspace savings!

So check it out: fb.com/hayday

That will redirect you too http://www.facebook.com/hayday (my page.) – just like fb.me, but traditional-like, lol. Neat eh? Anyone else know any facebook quick wins?

Clock Face by tibchris
Facebook Time in PHP, who the what where?

If you haven’t tried pulling anything time-sensitive out of the graph API yet, don’t, that’s my advice. There is not a single bit of coherent explanation as to how the API hand’s out times, when I first researched it I had written on my pad “Pacific time”…great, did my past (possibly beer holding) self not remember that Pacific time is one thing half the year and another the other half? PDT/PST? Obviously not. What’s more, now when I check (post something on a page, grab it with graph API) – its giving me GMT+00 times, WHEN I’M IN GMT+01.

All I can work out is facebook have either been pleasant enough to convert the time to the users original registration locale (likely, and pleasant) and not noted it down ANYWHERE publicly, or they have chosen to use GMT. Probably the former, either way – facebook developers – we need a better solution for working with facebook times.

You can host facebook apps on any host, but hosting somewhere unsecure (not accessible via https) will flag up the following prompt for anyone browsing to the page with secure browsing turned on (high proportion of fb users.) You CAN also use amazon cloud storage (S3) for free https file storage, up to a level, however you cannot run server side code (php/ASP.NET) without setting up a server with their EC service.

Not pretty eh? What will that do to your conversion rates? Yep nothing good.

Its not just the mavericks either, for example brands like banana republic are still running http stuff, prompting the user with this message on loading their like-capture pages.

Set up 1and1 shared hosting to host Secure SSL facebook apps/applications/tab pages

So anyway here’s the cheap, quick way to hosting your facebook apps SECURELY using 1and1 shared hosting.

1. Log onto admin.1and1.co.uk (or .com)
2. (Optional) Register a domain name which you don’t mind generically hosting your fb content. For me this is www.whfb.co.uk – this will only show up if users looked at the information for the frame, probably wont ever matter, but if you are running a whole host of different niche pages it might be worth it for simplicity/segmentation.
3. Go to domain management section and click “Shared SSL Encryption” under SSL option
   
4. Assign the Shared SSL Encryption to your generic domain/main domain you want to use
   
5. Setup a folder under your domain like you would with any facebook page, use the facebook php api to fangate or just put some html up there, bare in mind all objects referenced in what you put up should direct resources to “https” not http. That is if you reference “http://www.example.com/someimage.png”, switch the http for https (save your own copy of the file if you need to. Referencing images locally in the folder should work fine for http/https if you use the same domain.
6. Setup your facebook app (theres thousands of guides on this…) and set the following (under “Select how your app integrates with Facebook -> Page Tab”)
   
7. Add the app to your facebook fan page and visit it, (setting it as default landing page perhaps ) – you should not get any security messages, if you have you need to go back and check your html is pointing to any external elements via https.

Chances are if you are running 1and1 shared hosting (or any other major) then you will have SSLRelays free of charge with your package, what’s more this takes about 1 minute to setup, so test with this before you stick stuff in the cloud!

As I have been dabbling with facebook fan pages I thought I would share a few of the take-away’s, in this case purely to do with the branding of your facebook page, increasingly an important outward factor in all web developments – facebook fan pages are perhaps the building blocks of a good social sprawl. I will post later about the technicalities of using fan-gated iframe apps (hosting them on 1and1/Amazon S3 for no extra cost) and similar but for now lets focus on the looks.

Take a look at these few examples:

You have probably noticed straight away what I am getting at. Coherence. Branding coherence is an eternal battle for marketing departments, making your brand appear coherent to the corporate strategies laid down to be long term principles. In the realm of smaller web projects though its not such a huge deal. The first thing I do when setting up a new facebook page is get the overall branding planned and implemented. In short I make/contract 6 Images. These 6 images will either work well together, leaving a mark in the mind of an already bombarded potential fan or they’ll excite no one and be forgotten along with the other mediocre half-attempts. Get these 6 images right.

So here’s how it is. You are allowed a facebook profile pic for your page, this image can be just a logo (check out HP) or it can be utilised as any ad space might be, stick up an exclusives offer deal, some shocking message etc. This image can be up to 200 px x 600 px and you can upload a higher resolution, baring in mind the width will always be proportionate.

Your other 5 images come in the form of Tagged/Wall posted/Album images. These are shown across the top of your wall (where ultimately you wan’t your fans to be hanging out) and are sorted in a RANDOM order by facebook. That’s right, however you upload them they will occasionally appear in a completely different order unlike the ones on your personal profile page. These stick to normal photo proportion ratio’s and can be uploaded via the “upload photos” option on the pages’ wall. Remember they don’t have to be photo’s, use these 5 images to extend (coherently) the brand of the page you are trying to promote.

Take a look around, check out some pages of your favourite brands, I have no doubt they will be using the images in clever ways, ways that can improve like rates, conversation and overall brand image.

Facebook Fan Page Branding Template



(Adobe Illustrator CS4, 600kb Rar’d)

Its an Adobe Illustrator file with a dummy facebook page laid out with artboards setup for each of the 6 images I talk about above, it should let you create all your images in a single space so you can really get a feel as to how well they gel together. Once you have constructed your images, switch to artboard view and click each image in turn, remember when exporting the main profile pic image that it needs to be 200 pixels wide, this way you won’t suffer any of facebooks image downscaling nasties.

Scenario’s are either:

• Use facebook like button generator to generate code for a like button (sometimes even this bugs out..)
• Use some service like ShareThis to generate code for a facebook like button

• It shows as Zero – Facebook likes ’0′ even if you know that URL (that you installed it on, or fb page) has likes
• It occasionally shows correct like count, but most of the time shows Zero [0] like’s

Investigate with:

• Facebook Lint tool (object debugger)

After spending a few hours working out what was causing this 0 like problem on my facebook like button I narrowed it down to two problems people are experiencing:

1. Error in the code you are copying across. It should be an iframe (unless you are using XFBML) like the code shown on the facebook lint tool (object debugger.) In fact the best way I found was to use the object debugger to make the iframe code and then adapt that using parameters from the facebook like button generator as the likebutton generator bugged out for me. MAKE SURE its pointing to the right url, use https if you can and point it to the page which validates in Lint tool.
2. Page Problems. If your page doesn’t validate properly in the Lint tool (object debugger) then this is your issue, this is the likely situation if you are seeing it OCCASIONALLY show the right figure in your likes box, but mostly 0 [zero] likes. Page problems as far as I have experienced boil down to:
1. Facebook soft deleting your page and not telling you. If you are experiencing this ZERO likes situation it might well be that facebook has actually discontinued your page without telling you, leaving it on your admin menu’s and leaving the likes/wall/everything in tact. This is confusing as hell and I wish they would formally tell/make it obvious. Reasons why your page gets deleted? I am sure there are a bunch. I repeat. Your page may look to you to be live, with likes and all – but if you are experiencing zero likes on your like button it might also be deleted. Get your friend to search for it in the search box, if it doesn’t appear, you’ve had it deleted!
2. Restricted Content. We all love fangating, well its a working economy, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may occasionally cause a discrepancy in like button, potentially pointing a like button to an inaccessible page to the potential like’ee would mean facebook wouldn’t be able to access it and therefore show zero (whereas it might be showing you the proper number as you have access..)

Anyway, for a nice combo of a facebook like button and a google + button (are these going to be more and more important?) check the following code, don’t forget to replace your url

<div align="left" style="height:70px">
    <div id="fbbox" style="float:left;height:65px;width:55px;">
    	<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=***YOURURL***&layout=box_count" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="height: 65px; width: 55px" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>
    </div>
    <div id="gbox" style="float:left;height:65px;width:55px;"><g:plusone size="tall" href="***YOURURL***"></g:plusone></div>
</div>

If you want to read more about the plugin you can check out this post on, What is the point in Automated Editor or go right ahead and get it from wordpress.org or buy the professional version at AutomatedEditor.com.

Watch this space for a few posts on how I use the plugin, (it works fantastically well when rigged up with Auction2Post.)

First underestimation: Scale
Write a book, yeah I could do that, what is it like a hundred pages? probably 6 months and I will have something. No. Not for me at least. I know the pro’s can pull a lot out of the bag but in my haphazard way of writing up mountains in Nepal or in notepads in bars it’s not going to be so straightforward. Just actually setting a scale seemed difficult for me. I went with the standard, not to be caught up in the masses of writers but just to set myself a goal, some boundaries. Somehow this equated to a goal of between 80,000 and 100,000 words, which in fact has worked out really well for this novel, however I can see how easily things can go astray and I am all for writing shorter/longer pieces after this, or this series (perhaps .)

As I side note I guess I could put pace and planning under scale, as the scale of interest I showed them at the beginning was negligible, tiny. This was a big fail for me, I decided to write the book in chunks, jumping about the story but in doing so did create a little confusion and fragmentation. I probably lost a few months to fix up, re-correlation and re-planning, in the end it will still work but next time I am going to plan it conscientiously and write from start to finish.

Second underestimation: Enjoyment
There’s this funny kind of wall I have just hit in taking on this challenge, a kind of breakthrough point that I hope is not false thought. Once I had got the book to a state it was printable, once I had that big wodge of a4 paper in my hand emblazoned with a title no one has ever seen or read before it dawned on me. I guess it’s just a positive success thing, but for all I know the book could be atrocious. Either way, at the start when all that was keeping me going was stubborn discipline and coffee I never thought about what it would feel like to actually finish the thing. But then again it’s the last push, I don’t expect an easy time yet.

So now it’s the case of a bit more writing, a lot more editing and then the answer to the dubious question of publication. Along the way I have been reading around the niche and I can see that the book should hopefully fit snugly into it, at least as much as I can subjectively tell, after all I had always intended to get the thing out there. Having spent years learning the benefits of leverage and importance of self sufficiency I also hope it to be a business success. I have the marketing and online experience so at the moment I am leaning towards self publication, it seems ludicrous to give up such a proportion as 50+ % to a publisher ultimately for the namesake of being “published” traditionally. I set out to write a book to entertain, to hit shelves, and it might still do that (eventually – fingers crossed), but what’s more important to me is that it hits retina’s, cerebral cortex’s and maybe even stimulates mouths to discuss, after all there is only ever one first novel, if it helps support the writing of more all the better.

Self publication seems to be the better horse to back, as well as being the bigger challenge, or at least a challenge not a gamble. Here’s to Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler, Dean Wesley Smith and M J Rose for giving me the belief enough in the market to start planning.

Want to know if I have put you in the book? Well watch this space….

There is infinite uses for this – with facebook more and more integrating “likes” with their search and other stuff you will need this functionality to drive traffic from facebook. Anyway this used to be the easy case of using https://api.facebook.com/method/pages.isFan?access_token=… to get a 1 or 0 depending on whether or not the user had “fanned” the page/website/whatever.

But then came along the big bad Graph API, which to get this IsFan functionality is a bitch. Getting the “likes” directly works for the page owner (which confuses everything) but not for third parties, showing just the popular/main category “likes” against them (and you need extended permissions.)

Long and short of it there’s about 5 ways to skin this cat, all of which suck except this one, in my brief, frustrated look into it. In any case this uses FQL and the Graph API call to produce a Boolean indicating whether or not the user has fanned something with id $pageID. It works, in all scenario’s for me so far.

$likeID = $facebook->api(
array( ‘method’ => ‘fql.query’, ‘query’ =>
‘SELECT target_id FROM connection WHERE source_id = $userID AND target_id = $pageID’ )
);

if ( empty($likeID) ) {

// user has NOT Liked the page/whatever

} else {

// user HAS Liked the page/whatever

}

If only facebook would update their documentation to show how easy it is to fql query from the API!

As I said last post if I couldn’t find a reddit wallpaper downloading program I would make one. Well I found upboat (which is good) but with windows 7 (or display fusion) offering cycling desktop backgrounds every x minutes I thought I might write a more brute force downloader. So I did.

Reddit Wallpaper Grabber is essentially:

It’s only about 8 hours work, is unofficial and probably mildly buggy, but it works for me (and probably everyone on windows > 98.)

Features

• Save wallpapers in bulk, direct to a folder on your computer
• Get wallpapers from all the popular wallpaper reddit’s
• Sort by reddit sections (e.g. Whats Hot or Top of All Time)
• Include (or dont) NSFW Wallpapers
• Preview wallpapers before you download them
• Portable exe (No install needed, just runs when you open it)
• Its Free!

If you want to suggest feature requests/point out bugs then please do on the comments of this post. If you haven’t already – go ahead and download it.

Download v0.1 now of Reddit Wallpaper Grabber (its free!)
RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.exe (77kb)	RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.rar (52kb)

The reason this post really sparked was this post on pico projectors and what pico projectors might be like in 2015. I think pico projector’s (tiny projectors that will fit in your hand but produce a projection pretty much the quality of your old tv, anywhere @ 50 inchs) will get huge. I don’t doubt for one minute that MVIS stock will be the first sign of this in the coming months (the microvision showWX is going to be the worlds first mainstream big selling pico – prediction) and this will be only the start for developing display technology. Over the next 5 years visually representative technology will blossom. We will see embedded pico-projector’s slot into city planning, home design, products such as laptops (netbooks), mobile phones, games systems, camera’s. Within lcd little growth will happen but we will likely see some sort of “ultra hd” – probably double current full hd (1080p), while embedded pico’s will feature a whole host of new resolutions, by 2015 we will definitely see full hd pico’s. This development of display technology will usher in a new age of advertisements, coupled with Augmented Reality and revolution amongst the Operating Systems.

Which brings me nicely to Augmented Reality. AR. Currently there is much buzz around Augmented reality, which I believe really is the sudden sci-fi geek realisation that technically the technology to fully provide AR is out, its been out for more than a year. Smart phones with knowledge of where they are and decent digital cameras have been around longer than the iPhone. It seems once this dawned on people everyone made a mad rush to make something AR, regardless of what it is. As a result magazines, advertisers and marketing companies largely came first (presumably they had the quickest fluid funds to pay for AR.) This marrs the technology a bit if you ask me but perhaps as AR becomes more meaning based this will change. My jury is out on AR but I think it won’t be as big a deal as everyone is making out it will be.

Business will change, or rather some business’s will change the way they use technology. You always get early adopters but I believe a good proportion of companies that operate around creative, co-operative ideology will gear up more technologically as the younger generation come into professionalism. We will see different technological assistance of work in the workplace. Board meetings will not only be worldwide (like now via Cisco tele-conferencing) but they will be assisted by interactive technology, touch and display will play large parts in this technology, beyond the Microsoft surface table and towards the science fiction of minority report. Data will be housed, represented and communicated differently. A few years ago usb sticks and solid state drives didn’t offer an easy solution to copying files, network speeds were a 100th of what they largely are today, there was no cloud. As data management and storage develop as too will the way we use it. We will probably have identifiers rather than storage in 2015. e.g. rather than copying a file to a usb stick you will simply instruct your interface to relate that data to a physical object, a soundwave (a word/phrase perhaps?) or a time of day or place, provided you can prove who you are you could then recieve it. You could carry a 200gb file with you in your wallet or on your fingernail, as the likelihood is that 200gb file will be stored centrally in what people now call the “cloud” (but will probably be a server in london or a main city) and you will simply use a relation to prompt whatever interface into providing you with this file.

There will be hurdles in achieving universal centralised data but by 2015 there will be a huge proportion less of personal computing power stored in the home. The google OS is perhaps a sign of a branching of operating systems, but I don’t see google dominating the operating system market. Microsoft have become a lot stronger over the last 18 months but the real truth of it is that neither of these developers seem to be truely embracing all of the technology developments happening. Perhaps this lag in uptake is natural, Microsoft does show some promising signs but is held back by business concerns, google seems to throw itself into the ideas without checking they are in the right direction, linux, well linux is linux. By 2015 I predict there will be at least another major world provider of what we currently refer to as operating systems. The whole concept needs re-exploring from the ground up, even starting again beyond the google os. Touch for example, AR and improved options for display are all completely ignored by all of the aforementioned operating systems, Microsoft is the only developer that even references these things but is yet to truly develop a commercial option.

Search will change too. The last few years has seen a huge uptake worldwide in searching for things which in turn has pushed marketing, sales and online business into a whole new age. It’s also cemented new business models such as affiliate marketing, search based advertising and more grey area web production. The long tail has well and truly become a reality, many successful business people spend their days driving traffic from long tail search into successful sales. This will continue but it wont settle in a single routine for long. Affiliate marketing will take to interactive media more as this becomes more integral in everyday life, search will some how adapt to a new more astute audience that is used to getting good search results fast and who quickly picks up trends and becomes integral members of up and coming online phenomena such as reddit, twitter etc. Beyond real-time, search will need to integrate much more with outside sources, new operating systems and the work out the best way to catalogue and express the ever expanding online data and how it is created and used.

HTML 5 is on its way too, this will be a major improvement but it wont be the last the web sees pre 2015. By 2015 I believe that the “internet” as we know it, a vast linked store of webpages will be a very different beast. Microsoft (XBOX), Apple (iPhone), Sony (Ps3) – these are all well known, global brands and they are all investing / operating in the new world of applications. Pioneered by Apple and the iphone the idea of segmented approved tools that are properly ordered was a (very apple) genius idea. Bringing a (standard) apple simplicity to what was previously a confusing and avoided world of software for a lot of people. Microsoft, Sky, Sony and other huge technology developers did not miss this success. In the coming years slowly these companies will target specific software/hardware at every possible market audience. By 2015 every member of your family will be buying something digital. Expanding on the segmented digitally providable media of the iphone app, television programs, games, music, films and books will all be available at the click of a button, tap of a screen or utterance of a command (and payment systems such as xbox subscriptions and ps3 accounts will remove the actual money part of the transaction further accelerating digital sales.) This new availability of media will be supported by webpages, but the web-pages are much more likely to be totally interactive, 3d integration is already in browsers but we will see more of this as well as individualised experiences. Imagine every web-page you accessed could (based on rules of privacy) know your name, interests etc – the web could be a much more interactive environment. By 2015 though I think the web could be on its way to new pastures, gone with the current ideal of “pages” accessed by address. An OS with search integrally built in could remove the requirement for a browser, content could be constructed on the fly and applications/services/movies/experiences could replace pages as we know them, with the situation that web pages changing from a square, box of a screen to a multi surface vivid world that we live in, there is no doubt in my mind that the OS and the web “page” as we know it will adapt to a new medium.

We are living in a time which is the true beginning of technology adoption, 2015 might bring a few or all of my predictions into reality, it could just as likely bring thousands more. Social adoption will drive these things forward and in return the technology will hopefully create a more co-operative, fair and equal world society.