Blog: Facebook 
100 Users! Posted @ 23:47 on 23rd July, 2008
We've just reached 100 users on the Blaccu Weather Report Facebook App! How cool is that? I honestly didn't think anyone would use it when I made it, so it's really cool that people are actually adding it. Thanks guys!
In other news, I've set up an RSS feed for this blog, incase any of you out there are interested enough to keep up with what's going on. You can view the feed either by using the RSS icon at the top of the Blog pages, or by clicking here.
FB: Updating the Profile Box Posted @ 14:29 on 8th July, 2008
Further to my previous post regarding updating the user's profile box on a Facebook application, I found this site which shows you how to update everyone's profile content in one go. Of course, this means its Asynchronous, which isn't exactly what we want, but it appears this is the best Facebook allows for now. Obviously this poses a number of problems:- When to do the update. Since there is the opportunity to have people from all over the world using your app, there's very little chance of there being actual downtime in which all the updates can take place. Similarly, if you need to update things once a day at midnight, you should really be checking which country the user comes from and update their profile content at the right time.
- Resources. If you've got thousands of users, how do you process all of them without killing your server? There are,of course, many solutions to this (I've implemented something similar to this on a project of ours at work), but I think they're all pretty resource intensive. In the worst case when everyone's profile is different, even caching won't help you.
- How often to do the update. This of course depends on the nature of your application. With Blaccu, currently I only update everything once a day, but of course the weather will be changing many times during that day (subsequent visits to the canvas page / using the refresh button on the profile page do refresh the profile with the current weather, however), so it would be ideal to have it update many times during the day. This isn't so bad now when I don't have many users, but what about when (/if) I'vegot lots of users?
Blaccu Weather Report Part Trois Posted @ 13:29 on 3rd July, 2008
I've made the facebook app - you can sign up to it here. It's pretty basic at the moment, and I need to do a lot of research into how to get the weather to properly update on the profile page, but it works alright for now. The main issue is with automatic updates on the profile page. As far as I can see, there are two main options: 1. Flash - however this requires you to click the 'click to play' image before it begins to load 2. Ajax - however I don't think they let you call an Ajax request when it loads, so it has to be triggered. Hopefully there is a way around it on the Ajax front. If not it's quite disappointing - I'm sure FB would have their reasons for disallowing this, but it is very disabling for those of us developing apps that really need the info on the profile page to be dynamic. There is much reasearch to be done here, methinks.<< previous
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