ThirdParty - Kennydust

Facebook Connect -- for the iPhone

kennydust — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:55:00 GMT

Facebook is stretching their limits of their social reach beyond the web, and onto your iphone. Now, custom apps can be facebook aware, and allow for iphone owners to log-in to facebook, leveraging the facebook connect service.

For those of you who are not familiar with facebook connect, the original offering was web based only; conceived sometime last year and it allowed any web site to have some user integration with facebook, while allowing access to it's social features via it's API and proprietary markup language. Now with an iPhone offering, it gives the user more reason to stay on the very popular social networking site -- even without being on the social networking site.

More information about facebook connect here.

If you are interested in developing iPhone applications leveraging facebook connect, here is the link to their starter kit. Documentation link is here.

How To: Implement Facebook Connect on the iPhone in 5 minutes from Cat Lee on Vimeo.

Read the original announcement on their developer blog.

Commenting with Facebook's standalone widget

kennydust — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:25:00 GMT

Last week, Facebook released it's new Comment Box social widget which allows a developer to add threaded comment functionality to any site they want. It literally took me less than 5 minutes to slap it all together; and maybe if I didn't read stop to read all the itty bitty details, it probably would of taken me half that time. I must say, I'm pretty impressed -- it integrates well with my own site, and it looks slick. Facebook's widget allows allows for anonymous comments, so you don't necessarily need to be facebook user in order to submit your 2 cents.

So wow, I'm pretty excited, if that isn't pretty obvious. Also included in the widget is a fully functional administration tool to remove comments, blacklist users and all sorts of fun stuff. The developer can also limit the posts per page and further customizations via the XFBML spec.

Check it out, just scroll to the bottom to see their comment interface. Leave a comment if you wish too.

How To: Create a Comments Box with Facebook Connect in 5 Minutes from Pete Bratach on Vimeo.

EDIT (1/14/2010): Here's the link to the Comment's box wiki for more advance settings and parameters. One issue I ran into was getting the box to render, but thats only because facebook requires a valid callback URL.

Preventing TinyMCE from stripping embed tags from rich media code.

kennydust — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:03:00 GMT

For those who have never used the TinyMCE WYSIWYG pluggin, it's one of the industry's best kept secret; add this pluggin to your website, and you've got an instant Microsoft Word-like interface that supports pretty much all the different browsers and it's variations. Some of the things I've taken advantage of include creating custom toolbar buttons and leveraging their compressor paradigm to keep the scripts lightweight. Pretty neat indeed.

Now with that said, I've come across one issue which wasn't very clear initially on how to solve, because it had long been a bug since it's predecessor versions; I was inject YouTube object/embed code into the body of the TinyMCE editor -- and coming back out, the <embed> tag would be stripped out entirely. It was a little odd, and I tried a number of things to no avail. The solution? Define media_strict = false in your init() call. But only if you're utilizing the media pluggin. The media plugin assumes media_strict is true by default. The media_strict is a new option as of version 3.2.1.


tinyMCE.init({
   mode: "textareas",
   theme : "advanced",
   plugins : "media",
   media_strict : false
});

Hope this saves someone a day or two.