Facebook App Filter
Since Facebook has been unable to add my most sought after feature themselves, I took it upon myself to create something similar and simple with GreaseMonkey. I’ve thrown together a simple script that allows you to toggle application and game posts in your Facebook news feed and on your friends profile pages on and off with a single click. It shouldn’t replace your block option. This script is for people who would like to continue to use certain applications and play certain games but also not have to always weed through all those posts in order to see anything normal from their friends.
Currently tested with Firefox and Chrome. You can install it from here!
Source: userscripts.org
What Facebook’s news feed filters need
You might have noticed that Facebook released a new feature for their news feed. You can now pick certain types of posts (i.e. Status, Picture, Game, etc.) or you can choose a friends list and your news feed will filter down to only those posts. This feature actually existed before the most recent site redesign but I’m very happy to see it back. I do think Facebook can do better, though.
What I’d really like to see is either a new “custom filter” option or some added options to the creation of friend lists. I’m thinking of iTunes Smart Playlists for your news feed. Let me add and remove certain things from a filter or list. How about something like “Show me everything from my Friends, Family and Co-Workers but don’t show me any Games”? That seems like a filter that a lot of people would love to create. How about it, Facebook?
Facebook Privacy: 102 (Places)
Facebook just started rolling out their Places feature to most of the US. Location information is a very touchy subject for a lot of people so I thought I’d throw a quick post out about how to effectively manage the new privacy settings that were enabled with the Places rollout.
UPDATE: It appears I missed a setting. I recently stumbled across one more Places setting that I have since added to this article.
Facebook for iPhone v3.2
Facebook just updated their iPhone app for their Places roll out. They added a couple other little nice things too like privacy settings on a per-post basis and the nifty little “drag down to refresh” that Tweetie/Twitter has had forever now. One thing still lacking? Tagging in status updates. What’s the holdup, Facebook?
Facebook Privacy: 101
I get a lot of questions about how to use Facebook’s new (ish) privacy features so I thought I’d go through a quick 101 tutorial on settings things up and using them effectively. I’ll try and keep this as simple and quick as possible but I will also be covering all you really need to know about keeping your Facebook profile and the information you post on it safe.
Where do we start? We need to create some friends Lists. A friends List on Facebook is just a collection of friends for your eyes only. Your friends will never know what lists they are in (unless you tell them) so they’re just for you. If you really WANT to go all out and create that “Assholes” list, feel free without worrying about a thing. Follow the pictures and this should go swimmingly.
Select Account → Edit Friends from the top menu of Facebook
Here is your friends page! This page will recommend friends to you as well as give you various methods of organizing them. We want to view ALL of our friends right now..
Select Friends from the left side under Lists
There we go. Now we have all of our friends to look at. Let’s start organizing them by creating a new list…
Halo 3 Players now watches you in the shower..
Halo 3 Players is now watching you! I’ve added a History tab to Halo 3 Players on Facebook now! I’ll be saving an archive of all your old stats once a day (after you update your stats, of course) and you will be able to look at the progress you’ve been making over a variable number of days in several different stat types. You can see how your Kill-to-Death ratio has been improving (or not) or how many Killing Sprees per Game you we’re averaging 2 weeks ago compared to today! All the good stats are there, as well as my own true score (or best score, which ever you know it as) that combines your social and ranked stats (giving more weight and points to your ranked games, of course) and spits out a fancy overall score that you can compare against your friends to see who really is the best.
If you’ve been a fan of Halo 3 Players, this update should work great for you because I have been keeping track of gamertags for almost 2 months now (which means, if you’ve been using Halo 3 Players, you should have some information ready to graph on the History tab!). If you haven’t heard of Halo 3 Players or aren’t a member yet, what are you waiting for?! Show off your stats to all your friends! Scream from the roof tops how much you love Halo 3 by putting a profile tab on your Facebook page! Slap a box on your main profile for some more Halo 3 love! Compare your own stats against all your friends who are also using Halo 3 Players! There’s lots to go, so go do it! Why are you still reading this?
News and stuff..
After finding out that my free Joyent Facebook accelerator was going to expire in a week, i started acting fast.. I had to move Halo 3 Players from Joyent to my SliceHost slice (that also hosts this blog). Being a man strapped for cash, I really couldn’t afford the ‘upgrade’ offer that Joyent was offering. For a 512MB server, they wanted me to pay a $75 setup fee (to setup a server I’ve been using for a year now?) and then $75 a month on top of that. They had annual deals and even a ‘buy 1 year and get a 2nd for free’ deal for christmas, but again.. I’m broke. So I’m sticking with SliceHost and I think I’ll stick with them for all of my ‘cheap’ hosting needs. I’ve had a 512MB Slice on SliceHost for almost 2 years (?) now and it works fantastically.. And it’s about half as much as Joyent’s! Anyone who needs affordable hosting that’s awesome, check out SliceHost!
So the server move went well. Better than I thought it would. I actually rebuilt my Slice from scratch just so I could make sure it was clean and ready to serve up Halo 3 Players. It only took me most of a night to get all my web stuff back up and running and now I can just spend some spare time tweaking things.
What else is new? I’ve diving in, head first, into iPhone development. I’ve never really done anything with C, C++, Objective-C, Cocoa.. or anything really besides Ruby. So I’ve been cramming my brain with lots of new information and I think I’m doing quite well. I’d love to start developing games but I’m having a hard time finding a good ‘getting started’ book. I really need something that teaches the basic concepts behind efficient game programming, so if anyone knows of a good place for me to start, leave a comment or something. That would be great!
That’s all I got for now. I’m thinking of doing a nice blog post when I have some very general understanding of game programming to help anyone else who’s just starting out. Until then.. Have a great holiday and I’ll write more whenever I have something to write about! x=)
Halo 3 Players 2.x
Halo 3 Players was updated a few weeks ago. Most of the initial bugs have been squashed with only 1 main feature still left to be finished. I’m working on Challenges now and they should be back very shortly. The new 2.x version is a complete rewrite of the old Halo 3 Players. Since Halo 3 Players has been my first ‘real’ project, I did learn quite a bit from it and was able to improve a lot of things in the new version. So besides the nicer look and extra features, it also works better behind the scenes (and is even a little more modular so I can improve stuff even more without breaking other things). If your a Halo 3 Player and have a Facebook account, you should definitely check it out! It blows the other 2 or 3 Halo 3 applications out of the water and I’m not just saying it because I wrote this one. I promise you if you try out Halo 3 Service Record and Halo 3 Gamer Card and think they’re better than Halo 3 Players.. I don’t know. I’m confident enough that Halo 3 Players kicks them to the curb that I include links straight to their app right here..
Almost there!
It’s amazing what a whole day of work (with the occasional Halo 3 break) will do for you. Last night when I updated, I felt like I had so much to do to get my application cleaned up and ready for prime time again. Since I’ve been planning on this 1.5 release to be a larger release, I haven’t been very careful about breaking stuff. I’m pretty OK with that though. I broke things on purpose because I knew I could implement them better. The only problem with it, was that my brain KNEW a lot of things were out of order but didn’t know exactly what. So after a day of fixing everything up, I’m back on track. The challenges backend is pretty solid. A few tweaks here and there are going to be needed, but it definitely works. I still need to pretty it up a bit too. The biggest accomplishment of the day, though, was reworking the flash system. Since I drop things like updating gamertags to the background, the user doesn’t get to see what’s happening. I have to use memcached, and check to see if the process is done. I kind of wrote myself into a corner with the old code because it was pretty much ONLY used for updating the gamertag. Now that I have some extra methods (like creating and finishing challenges) that need to be done in the background too, I had to make the system more flexible. I feel like I did this really well and it should work for me in the future if I have to add some more functionality to it.
On today’s agenda, I’m hoping to finish up the loose ends of the Challenge backend and get the views to a nearly complete state. I’ll probably continue to test out everything as I go along to make sure I didn’t overlook anything that I thought I fixed up. Some of the things I changed for this release sounded like a huge task in my head, but ended up only taking me about 10-15 minutes to do. One thing I changed that I thought would take me a while was switching from @user.id to @user.facebook_uid for all my user stuff. I thought it looked kind of silly to have haloplayers/user/123 which would like to the facebook id or 137412794. Using the facebook id for EVERYTHING (except database associations because I couldn’t really figure out how to get away from the primary id on that) took away a lot of confusion. Lessons learned.
Anyways. That’s about all I got. I don’t know why I’ve gotten into the rambling mood the last couple of days. I think I’m going to try and get a couple hours of sleep before I wake up and start working some more. Good night, folks!
Road to One Point Five
Halo 3 Players hasn’t been out for a month yet. I believe the first day it went live was November 20th. That doesn’t mean I’ve just been sitting back and watching the user count slowly grow for a few weeks now. Since it’s initial release, I don’t even recognize parts of the application any more, let alone the code! Anyways.. Since I don’t update here as often as I’d like, I’d like to ramble about my first large update to Halo 3 Players since it was released.. I don’t expect to make a whole lot of sense, but I just want to collect some of my thoughts here to better make sense out of them and if anyone happens to actually READ this, maybe they can offer some input.
The largest thing that users of Halo 3 Players will notice is the addition of Challenges. I have bigger ideas for challenges, but for the initial 1.5 release, the user will be able to challenge themselves in a speed game. You set the number of something you want to increase and see how fast you do it. If you want to see how quickly you gain 5 EXP points, set up the challenge and play. When your done, we’ll record your time and show your friends so they can take a stab at trying to beat your time. The concept is simple and I think it will add a lot more of a social aspect, not to mention, competition. I’ve got most of the back end roughly finished. It definitely needs a lot of polish, but it works. I intend on going through most of my code and refactoring some things to work a little better before this release and that should help me clean up the new challenges code too. One of the larger problems I’m running in to is that some of the tasks that require me to fetch information from bungie.net take a few seconds to complete if bungie.net is going slow. I implemented a system that spawns these update processes to the background and I use memcached to store information about what’s happening. This worked OK for updating the gamertags, but when since I’m moving it over to more aspects of the application, I’m definitely going to need to rewrite some of that code to be more flexible. I’d also LIKE to figure out some way to use AJAX to constantly check the status of the background updates and refresh some things automagically when it’s done. We’ll see if that makes the 1.5 release or I wait until 1.6 for that one. I hope I can get 1.5 out by the middle of the week. That would be great.
On a side note, I’m really enjoying working with the Facebook Platform. It didn’t take a whole lot of work to learn how things worked and my obsessive-compulsive nature really loves how clean things look when your application blends in with facebook so well..
I think I’m done rambling about this stuff. It’s 5am. Time for a little bit of sleep before I get back to work..
Halo 3 Players on Facebook
I’ve released my very first Facebook application! A few days ago, Halo 3 Players went live on Facebook! I learned me how to do a few things on a Solaris system (I’m using that free for a year joyent facebook accelerator), and finally learned how to use Capistrano. After you understand what Capistrano does, it’s amazing how awesome it is! I’ve thrown a few code updates out already since it’s as easy as ‘cap deploy’. I can’t believe I never learned it earlier. Anywho’s, just thought I’d throw a post up here and tell anyone who plays Halo 3 and has a facebook, head on over to Halo 3 Players and let me know what you think.
Update: Haha.. I wrote this about 2 weeks ago but I guess I accidentally checked the ‘draft’ button so it never published…
New Facebook Gem/Plugin
I’ve been using the RFacebook Gem and plugin for my latest facebook application. It works great and all, but the things I’ve read about it are very true. It’s really not very ‘ruby’. I like all the features and it’s not too hard to use, but I’m sure we can do better to integrate facebook and rails in a prettier way. I’m wondering if anyone wants to collaborate on a new gem or a new plugin that would make things more Ruby-ish.
A few things I would love to see would be some form of meta-programming that could map calls to something like Facebook::User.getInfo, instead of fbsession.user_getInfo. Just looks nicer. I’d also love to see some form of Active Record integration. The acts_as_facebook_user helper is great, but it still requires you to call manually call a facebook API call from your controller to get user information. It would be great to have something like User.facebook_info[:first_name] without any extra effort. Just something to take the facebook data portion out of the controller and put it where it belongs, in a model. Last, but not least, RFacebook compatibility to maintain applications until they can refactor to use the new methods.
Anyone who wants to help out with this, I’d love to get some type of plan written up and some good people working on it to get something working quickly and well. Let me know!
Mephisto Plugin for Twitter
I’m late to the bus. I just found twitter yesterday and I think it’s a pretty cool concept. It’s nothing entirely useful, but it’s just fun. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve HEARD of twitter, just never tried it out until yesterday. Also, yesterday, I started screwing around with Dan Webb’s mephisto plugin for lastfm. What do these 2 things have in common you might be wondering? After looking at how easy it was to grab an xml file with users timelines from twitter via their api, I realized how easy it would be to modify Dan’s excellent lastfm plugin to work with twitter. So that’s what I did. I created a quick edit of the lastfm mephisto plugin to create my very own twitter mephisto plugin!
It seems to work pretty well. I’m actually intending on making it a little more feature packed in the future. There’s not a whole lot more you can do with it considering Twitter’s super duper simplicity, but I might take a stab at adding basic authentication so you can view ALL of your timelines with this plugin or maybe even come up with some way that you can edit create new status messages from your blog or your blogs admin page (when mephisto matures a little more to support admin plugins). Anyways, enough blabbing by me. Here’s the 411 on how to use it.
Install it like so from your mephisto root.
script/plugin install http://svn.dnite.org/mephisto_twitterRestart your mephisto (I’m pretty sure this is necisary to load up the new plugin) and you can edit your layout page (or any of your liquid pages) to include your twitter status!
{% twittertimeline user: 'swemoney', type: 'user_timeline' as status %}
{{ status.text }} - {{ status.relative_created_at }}
{% endtwittertimeline %}If you want to know where your at in the loop, twittertimeline.index will return that for you. Any questions, post them here!
