Boomerang via @fredwilson and @cdixon

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Boomerang via @fredwilson and @cdixon

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and that you’re gearing up for a great New Years!

Anyway, I picked up a Kindle Fire for Christmas and decided to use it as an eReader at least once in its life. I had remembered seeing Boomerang by Michael Lewis recommended by both Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon so I figured it must be worth checking out.

The book is a short, easy read but it offers a fascinating perspective on the global financial crisis through several different viewpoints. As Chris pointed out, theres also a couple of funny anecdotes and bizarre cultural highlights. If you have some time to kill, I’d definitely recommend picking up Boomerang and giving it a once over.

Toggle non-consecutive checkboxes with jQuery UI

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Toggle non-consecutive checkboxes with jQuery UI

You’re all probably familiar with the UI convention of allowing users to select ALL or NONE for a list of checkboxes (like in Gmail). Recently I was working on a project that had a large table full of checkboxes (imagine a 10×10 grid) where the user would need to toggle some but not all of the checkboxes in a given row. And to make matters more complex, they would need to toggle groups of non-consecutive checkboxes (say 15, skip 10, 5, etc.). I threw on the thinking cap but couldn’t think of any similar interactions I’d seen and couldn’t think of a particularly good way to achieve this.

Enter jQuery UI. I happened to stumble across the jQuery UI Selectable documentation and realized it would provide a good UI experience to toggle some but not all of the checkboxes. The code to implement this is surprisingly simple:

Note: You don’t actually need the div container – that was just for JSFiddle.

And then the Javascript (jQuery + jQuery UI):

You can check out a live demo at http://jsfiddle.net/whMyQ/3/

As always, questions and comments are welcome!

Facebook: How-to force users to LIKE page

By Ashish Datta | 28 Comments on Facebook: How-to force users to LIKE page

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:

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.

Deleting files older than specified time with s3cmd and bash

By Matt Daum | 19 Comments on Deleting files older than specified time with s3cmd and bash

Update: Amazon has now made it so you can set expiration times on objects in S3, see more here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1303

Recently I was working on a project where we upload backups to Amazon S3.  I wanted to keep the files around for a certain duration and remove any files that were older than a month.  We use the s3cmd utility for most of our command line based calls to S3, however it doesn’t have a built in “delete any file in this bucket that is older than 30 days” function.  After googling around a bit, we found some python based scripts, however there wasn’t any that was a simple bash script that would do what I was looking for.  I whipped this one up real quick, it may not be the best looking but it gets the job done: