Facebook Connect – Comments widget

The Facebook Connect world just keeps on getting better and better, not only do we have the wonderus Facebook connect core, we now have widgets for nearly every blogging platform and on top of that FB have released a new comments widget that can plug directly into your site with little effort and code.

facebook-logo

With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via their APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.

The Comments Box comes with additional social features:

  • Fully customizable: Specify background color, text color, and other attributes by providing your own custom CSS to incorporate this best into your site.
  • Access to raw data: Query all comments via the comments.get API method or the comment FQL table.
  • Administration and moderation: Manage the privacy and permissions of your comment boxes on an individual or global basis.
  • Integrates seamlessly regardless of whether you do or don’t have Facebook Connect already on your site.

So as you can see it is pretty powerful, and you can get more info, plus the code from the Facebook Blog

I’m speaking at SES London

The blog has been a bit quiet over the last month since i have been a very busy little bee.

I just wanted to write a quick post to say that i am speaking at SES London tomorrow on the 19th February at 12:45 on the Successful Site Architecture panel.

We will pretty much be covering the following…

Learn how to successfully architect your site for search engines and how specific page elements and design technologies may impact your ability to gain good organic listings. Covers topics such as directory and file structure, server-side includes (SSIs), 404 error trapping, JavaScript, robots.txt use, frames, secure area usage, and much more. Toward the end of the session, volunteers from the audience will have their sites examined to see how changes could be made to their site architecture and design to increase search engine traffic, as time allows.

I am going to cover the more technical details, so if you around come and sit in my session and cheer me on 🙂

Dean chew SES

Wanna build social media apps without the code?

Well now you can with Zembly 🙂

Zembly

What the hell is Zembly may you be asking? Well according to their website…

Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.

At Zembly, you can easily and instantly…

  • author social applications using your browser
  • participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code
  • use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications
  • publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

So as you can see Zembly gives you a way to generate applications for a number of platforms without having to learn the code for each of the said platform. So how do you go about actually creating them?

Basically you have an online editor which allows you to take sample code snippets from other projects that people have made and then insert them into your application. For example you may be trying to work out how you can build a voting system, you would search using the inbuilt search function for “voting” and then it would return you all the code snippets which you could then plug straight into your application.

Once you have your application built you can then save it onto the Zembly server so you don’t even have to sort out hosting or setting up your server to handle applications. Once done you can submit your app’s to say, Facebook and watch the millions of $$$ roll on in 🙂 You can already check out a Facebook application which has been made using Zembly called Capitol Punishment, as you can see it is pretty robust.

Zembly is currently in private beta so keep an eye on their site for when it comes available.

Chewie.co.uk – Now with Facebook Connect

My fascination with Facebook connect just grows and grows, i absolutely love it and as such i have decided to add it to this blog so that users can login and comment using their Facebook credentials. Obviously i realise that my blog doesn’t get a massive amount of traffic nor comments but i truly believe in FB connect as a platform which can greatly increase the exposure of your site, so lets see how it goes.

I have modified the wordpress plugin from Sociable.es and it is so easy to configure and change. You just upload the entire directory into your wp plugins and then go to Facebook and add the developers application. Once there, click ‘New Application’ and then you will be given a key that you put in the settings section of wordpress. If you get stuck along the way just checkout the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin.

Save them both and away you go. Its worth noting that there are two other wordpress plugins available for Facebook Connect but they are no where near as good as the one from Sociable.

You can use the Facebook Connect form on the right of this page to login and comment from now on 🙂

iPhoto 09 integrates with Facebook Connect

Well Mac fans, here is some interesting news from Apple today. It seems that iLife 09 (which includes such software as iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band etc etc) will have a rather useful plugin for iPhoto 09 which will allow users to upload their snaps directly to Facebook by using the incredibly useful Facebook Connect.

You should know by now that i am a very big fan of Facebook Connect and it is great to see that it is now being implemented directly in programmes along side web sites and web applications.

Apparently the user will have full control of the privacy of the image settings whilst in iPhoto, and then they just simply hit a button to upload and away you go.

You can check out the video over at apple.com to see more or find out more information about Facebook Connect by visiting the Facebook Category here on my blog