{5} Setfive - Talking to the World » mashup

Facebook: How-to force users to LIKE page

Ashish Datta — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:39:41 +0000

With Facebook’s move to deprecate FBML for tabs the documentation around how to make a “please Like! before…” has become much more choppy and inconsistent. Anyway, I recently found myself in a position where I needed to make this happen so here goes.

With in-line FBML deprecated, the only way to accomplish this without using a third party branded solution is to create a Facebook iframe app. Here are the steps you need to take to get something up using PHP and the Facebook PHP SDK.

1. Create a new Facebook Application at https://developers.facebook.com/apps

2. Configure your new Facebook App the enable “Website” and “Page Tab”. You’ll need to enter a valid URL for the following fields:

Site URL
Page Tab URL
Secure Page Tab URL

You’ll also want to use a HTTPs URL since Facebook sessions default to HTTPs by default and your iframe will be marked insecure if its over vanilla HTTP. For this walk through, lets assume were using https://www.setfive.com/fb/index.php? as the URL.

3. Now, you’ll want to add your new App to a Facebook Page. The easiest way to do this is to use this URL https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL replacing YOUR_APP_ID and YOUR_URL with your App ID and then a URL that is derived from your endpoint (or even just your endpoint). When you load that URL, you’ll be prompted to add your app to a page – select the page you want and submit the form.

4. The final piece is throwing together the actual PHP script. You’ll need the Facebook PHP SDK available on GitHub – https://github.com/facebook/php-sdk. Clone that and then this is the PHP script you’ll need:


 'YOUR_APP_ID',
  'secret' => 'YOUR_APP_SECRET',
));

$req = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
?>





    
    






	Content for users that have LIKED the page.



	Content for users that HAVE NOT LIKED the page.

And thats it! Now you’ll be able to gate content from non-fans while growing the fanbase of your Facebook Page.

Drop any questions in the comments.

FanFeedr Widgets Are Live!

Ashish Datta — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:31:42 +0000

Over the past few weeks we had the opportunity to work with FanFeedr to put together some widgets for their sports news platform. Previously, FanFeedr had been using Sprout to build their widgets but this required someone to hand build a Flash widget for every “resource” on FanFeedr (there are a lot). In addition, since the Sprout widgets are Flash they aren’t easily crawled by search engines.

Our widgets are different. They allow FanFeedr to generate widgets on the fly for any of their pages and allow users to customize the color schemes. Check out a widget builder for the NY Yankees here.

Basically, our widget builder works by allowing users to customize the size and colors used in the widget. This data is serialized as a JSON object and then base64 encoded so that it can be sent to the “generator” on the server. Then, the server unpacks the payload and builds a widget according to the data specified in the JSON object. In addition, our embed code includes a noscript tags so that search engines pick up the links in the widget as well.

Anyway, working with FanFeedr was a great experience and we hope to continue our relationship moving forward. Go build yourself a widget!

The Redline Challenge

Ashish Datta — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:26:43 +0000

For one reason or another we decided to sponsor a pub crawl this weekend. The plan was hatched over some beers at Underbones on Thursday night for a Saturday morning go time. We knew we basically needed three things: a list of bars, some swag (tshirt?), and obviously a website. We decided that the route of the crawl should follow the MBTA Redline so that we could start downtown and then finish in Somerville. This made picking bars pretty simple, gave us some branding, and of course we registered
REDLINECHALLENGE.COM.

We wanted the website to have some informative information, live location updates, and of course pictures of the debauchery. The biggest problem was that neither Daum nor I have location aware phones. To get around this, we decided to update Twitter with our current location along with a “#loc” hashtag and then have the site update based on that. Since we were all ready using Twitter, we decided to use Twitpic to allow us to post pictures to twitter on the fly. Additionally, we took advantage of Verizon Wireless’s email to SMS service and allowed people to contact us via the website. All told, we built the site in about 3 hours and it proved to be pretty useful. People used it to find us on the crawl and to contact us while we were out. Everyone also got a kick of seeing a live photo stream.

What’s next? Clearly, The Greenline Challenge.

Google Calendar API create on alternate calendar

Ashish Datta — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:47:30 +0000

A few months ago we integrated Google calendar into an application that we built for a client. Anyway, today I sat down to customize which calendars certain events were being created on. We’re using the Zend Framework’s GData package to interact with Google Calendar and surprisingly the documentation is pretty lacking.

Specifically, I was looking to create events on a calendar that was not the “primary” calendar for a user. After poking around and experimenting, I finally got things to work.

First, you can retrieve the list of available calendars with:

$service = Zend_Gdata_Calendar::AUTH_SERVICE_NAME;
$user = sfConfig::get("app_gcal_user");
$pass = sfConfig::get("app_gcal_password");

$client = Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::getHttpClient($user, $pass, $service);
self::$service = new Zend_Gdata_Calendar($client);
$calFeed = self::$service->getCalendarListFeed();

$arr = array();
foreach ($calFeed as $calendar) {
  $arr[] = array( “title” => $calendar->title->text, “uri” => $calendar->getEditLink(“alternate")->href   );
}

Next, when creating the events pass in the uri and the events will appear on the alternate calendar.

self::$service->insertEvent($event, $arr[1][“uri”]);

Client side RSS aggregator

Ashish Datta — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:37:23 +0000

One of our clients came to us a few days ago asking us if we could build something to aggregate several RSS feeds and then display it on their site.

Easy enough. Except the caveats were 1) This had to be done on a shoe string budget and 2) We had no permission to script on the server side (only client side scripting allowed kids).

We put our heads together and realized that Yahoo Pipes would provide the functionality to easily combine several RSS feeds, sort them, filter them, ect. And best part? It’s all built and all free. Pipes also provides the functionality to export a pipe as a JSON feed (as opposed to RSS).

So that takes care of problem 1 and almost fixes problem 2. Of course the remaining problem is getting around the cross domain XHR restrictions on the JSON. I did some poking around the Yahoo Pipes documentation and it turns out you can add a _callback parameter to the URL and bang it wraps the JSON in a JS callback!

Issues solved. The final part was to mix in a little jQuery to load the JSON+callback feed into a