Its official, we have opened up ChooseFest.com, so go check it out, now, what are you waiting for? Click Here!

ChooseFest is all about festivals, music festivals. In short it takes your music tastes (from facebook, last.fm scrobble history, a list you type) goes through all of the line-ups (kept up to date daily!) and then spits out a convenient, summarised list of all the festivals which have the bands (and singers) you particularly like at. It’s kind of a festival search engine, its kind of a music to festival matching site, but it will be a whole lot more in months to come.

What problem does it solve?

Ever tried to find the festival which has the most bands you like at? It’s a nightmare. Each festival has its own “arty” site, each festival has different dates, prices, availability, not to mention they have their bands and artists in obscure orders over several web pages. All that data collating is not easy or fun. ChooseFest.com Makes it easy (and hopefully fun), you just stick in who you want to see and up pops your best options.

Where’s the project at?

ChooseFest is a StormGate production and you can find it on facebook and have a go with the prototype (alpha app) @ ChooseFest.com. We have a few hundred users and are now soliciting feedback, it would be great to hear what you think, and at such an early stage your comments could really make a difference to us.

Want to help out?

Please help us Spread the word, share us with your friends, give us feedback! – the more people we can tell about ChooseFest the more chance there is we can make this a really, really useful tool for us all.

The post Finding Your Perfect Festival – ChooseFest.com first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

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!

The post Hosting facebook Apps/Applications/iFrame Pages on 1and1 (SSL) first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

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!

The post Facebook Graph Api – Is user a fan of page id – Using FQL and opengraph to mimic Pages.IsFan first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.