Brontesaurus Blog

During my journey in creating Friend Dashboard, this was a major problem I ran into, and it seems to be a pretty common one. Internet Explorer seems to have issues with ajax requests in an iframe Facebook application. The problem I was seeing was that there seemed to be no Facebook session when the ajax call was made so there would be a 302 redirect to authorize the application.

If you search google for this specific problems, you see a lot of answers regarding IE’s cookie security settings. The only solution I saw was to set P3P headers to something and for each time I saw this answer posted, I saw “it didnt” work responses. This solution didn’t work for me even trying multiple P3P header settings.

Luckily there is an easy work around. Since these are just ajax calls we are dealing with, theres always going to be an active Facebook session with the user. All you have to do is pass around the session key.

I use Facebooker, and made a fork of it adding a 3rd optional param to Facebooker::Session.create where you can specify a session key.
Example:

Facebooker::Session.create(nil, nil, "92._dCBMpo06FZpYozYh_bi_Q__.3600.1266554900-593863437")

Just pass the session key between methods any way you want. Since I was already utilizing memcahed, I used that.

This may not be the “right” way to solve this problem, but it definitely works and fighting with browser compatibility is already a pain as is.

http://github.com/abronte/facebooker

The other week I noticed that there wasn’t a real way to just quickly view your friends on Facebook. If you want to access somebodies profile page, they either have to be online recently, type there name in directly, or bring up Facebook’s tiny little “See All Friends” modal that lists friends one by one. None of these methods that are provided is what I want. I want a big, easy to view table of my friends. There are about 4 or 5 of their profiles I write on and check regularly and I wanna be able to visually access them with ease.

So I did exactly that, and Friend Dashboard is born.

The way I describe this application on its fan page, is that it is

an easy way to view all your friends in one nice table. No lists, and no searching, just an easy to view table.

You can also easily order your friends by simply dragging and dropping. Hover over your friend’s name to view their last status.

I felt that there is possibly a need for this in the Facebook community (there was for me), and that I could possibly expand on this idea of a “Friend Dashboard” by including other information.

Also in case you are interested, here are the techonlogies I utilized when making this app:

• Ruby on Rails
• Facebooker (ruby facebook api)
• jQuery
• Simpletip (jquery tooltip plugin)
• Memcached
• CouchDB

If you think this may be of some use to you, I suggest checking it out.

Friend Dashboard

This year was my very first Barcamp ever, let a lone first sort of tech unconfrence.  To say the least, I had a blast. If you don’t know what Barcamp is, it’s basically a meetup of people who want to learn, or who want to teach others. The whole idea behind it is its completely open to the attendee, they get to decide what they want to do and listen to. Best part of all, its  free. You also get exposed to a wide range of topics. This year there were talks from brewing your own beer, there was a straight coding session where everyone participated, to social engineering NASA and open source hardware hacking.

Now while I enjoyed every talk I sat in on, there were 3 that I liked the most.

1. “Improving Education through Costanza’s Rules of Opposites” via @paulandersen
2. “How not to be a freelancer” via @viss Video
3. “Social Engineering NASA” via @n8foo

My favorite was the “Social Engineering NASA” talk by far. It was more of just a story, but what a story it was.

Barcamp was a lot of fun this year, and I can’t wait for next year’s.

Photo Cred: Tomasthanes

Update: Added video link to “How not to be a freelancer”

I spend a lot of time on the internet and I read a lot of different blogs and over and over again I keep seeing this same design being used.

It’s called iNove created by mg12.

It’s a really good Wordpress theme and all and that’s probably why its so popular, but can’t you do something to it so I’m not looking at the same thing everywhere I go?

Now when I was searching for a Wordpress theme to use, I was looking for something that wasn’t used by everyone and their grandma and one that I could make changes to so it would be unique to me. I’m not web designer, but I always thought this was good practice and common sense to have a design unique to you. You don’t need to spend a bunch of money on a design, you can easily find a design you like and modify it.

Here is the original design of my blog, a theme called Coporate by Oripearl.

My design is very similar, but I changed a few things.

1. Added my own logo and favicon. (An old co-worker of mine made it in paint)
2. Got rid of the blue box on top
3. Changed the spacing around a big
4. Changed font colors and the box colors too

There are a whole bunch of easy modifications you can do to make it fit you.

1. Change which side of the screen the sidebar is one
2. Add or remove a sidebar
3. Change width of the site, make it wider, thinner, etc
4. Change the color scheme around
5. Change the fonts

I am really happy with what I was able to do with the design and I think i have a clean yet unique look. Also if you do chose to use somebody else’s work, be a pal and link back to them .

Its been huge news the past couple day, The Pirate Bay Bay guys have been found guilty and the four involved are sentenced to 1 year in jail and to pay fines in a total of $3.2 million. This verdict is a pretty big surpise to everyone because of the TPB’s “King Kong” defense and of course everyone is appealing the ruling. Now the big wig corporate pardon my french, assholes, at the RIAA and MPAA are probably thinking this is a big win for their causes, but they have only won the battle, the war is far from over. Filesharing can never be controlled and it will never be stopped until all these corporations start adapting their product for today’s users. The only thing that these corporate guys are looking at are dollar signs, and when they dont see enough cash coming in, they want to blame somebody for that. They do nothing but point fingers and where they should be pointing those fingers are at themselves. Did they ever think they have a crappy product that nobody is willing to pay money for? Or perhaps they are making it a pain in the ass for their users to enjoy the content they are producing? This trial, along with most of file sharing legal troubles is nothing more than a witch hunt. Bottom line is these companies really need to start adapting themselves to their users if they really want to solve the piracy “problem”.

/rant

Update: ISP refuses to shut down The Pirate Bay – “We will not censor sites for our customers; that is not our job. I am against anything that contradicts the principle of a free and open Internet.”

[Photo: nrkbeta @ flickr]

This can be accomplished with one command update-rc.d. I always forget this command so what would be a better way to remember this other than put it here?

Recently I wanted to disable webmin from starting up because I didnt need it, it was another open port, and also a security risk.

update-rc.d -f webmin remove

If I want to make it startup on boot,

update-rc.d webmin defaults

This command can be used for anything program with a script in /etc/init.d and is a great way to manage all the symbolic links in the rc.d folders.

Shared hosts are a great way to get started on the web whether you want to make a blog, start a forum, or you want to start developing your own applications, and did I mention shared hosting can be really cheap? That low monthly bill doesn’t come without a price, and no, I’m not talking about dollars and cents here, I’m talking about service. There is a huge trade off  when getting such a service so cheaply. I see a lot of people who rely on these shared hosts for their businesses, client websites, and a lot of mission critical applications and it is just a flat out bad idea.

When not to choose a shared host:

• If you rely heavily on email
• If speed and reliability is important
• If you expect your data to be backed up
• If you expect tech support to know what they are talking about
• If your online business is important to you

If these sort of things are really matter to you then spending the extra 10-20$ a month for a reliable VPS. It may not have all the bells and whistles, but you get a lot more in return. It may not have all the bells and whistles a shared has offers with unlimited bandwidth and a billion other things, but if you are at the point to where one or more items in the above list affects you then than going this route should be worth it.

As for myself, I am sort of an uptime freak and obsessed with the health of my machines so I dont really mind spending a little extra money to fulfill these obsessions of mine. Even with that being said, there are still appropriate times when using a shared host makes the most sense.

• You want to start a blog/forum/photo album/etc
• You want to learn new web technologies (shared hosts are great to mess around with code)
• Cheap and great way to get started on the web
• If you want email with your domain

Both solutions have their pros and cons, I suggest looking at your needs and expectations and choose which way to go is right for you.

Photo credit: JohnSeb

Anyone else tired of these overly self-promoting twitter pages where a user has a giant picture of them, some cheesy buzzwords to describe themselves and around a billion different ways to contact them? The over all theme of twitter is very minimalistic, how much can you say in 140 characters. The same concept applies to your website and bio and people are making really ugly and just down right annoying pages because they think its good marketing to have a huge ass picture of themselves for their background and 10 different ways to contact them and all the social networks they are a part of. Isn’t all this info what a website is for? If I really cared enough to contact you, I would DM you or go to your website and see other ways of contacting you.

I honestly cant take any twitter user seriously that has this sort of layout. 99% of these people claim to be “social network marketing experts” or some something regarding marketing. Now I know that twitter can be a GREAT marketing tool, but these guys are just basically “doing it wrong“. If you want to market on twitter have a page that makes me not want to bang my head against the desk and have something meaning full to say, something that will catch my eye and intrigue me, NOT A HUGE ANNOYING PICTURE OF YOURSELF AND A BUNCH OF BUZZWORDS.

Case and point:

• http://twitter.com/skydiver
• http://twitter.com/mikefilsaime
• http://twitter.com/MarketingZap
• http://twitter.com/prosperitygal
• http://twitter.com/davelawrence

/rant

And in HD =D. As a huge fanatic Simpsons fan myself, I am very excited about this.

They need a home too!