Taiwan Daily Facebook App

Greetings!

The Taiwan Daily Facebook App is up and running again. Now they have changed around their system and you don't have all those boxes in your profile page. It used to be that one of those boxes could show the Taiwan Daily Picture if you add it to your profile page. Now that part of their site has disappeared completely, so I had to redo the whole thing using their javascript sdk / jquery. It wasn't easy, but following the laborious yet successful completion of LinkMan, this one turned out to be much quicker. Now, I guess I need to figure out how to post one picture per day, or a weeks worth, on the user's streams. I wonder how many people want to get one picture per day on their facebook stream.... I guess we'll find out soon.

New Application

Dear Folks,

I recently set up a new facebook application to save your facebook links. Please add it and let me know if you have any trouble with it. This is important because facebook only displays your links 6 at a time now and it takes a long time to go through them if you have more than a dozen! Also, it is very difficult to capture the source html they are using, so I made it easy to copy the html including the image location in one go. FBML is getting deprecated, so I wrote the new app completely in Javascript on a normal html page. No more php sdk. Less load on the server.

I re-learned their entire api system since it had totally changed since I worked on the Taiwan Daily App. Now, I see that one is totally out of date so the next step is to start working on that and get it back into tip-top-shape.

Getting Cold!

I like to remark to my compatriots back in the USA that it's "getting cold" over here in Taiwan - you know - like below 70 F ! Still, I think they fail to understand that without any heaters, when you're riding around on a motor scooter, it's friggin cold man!

Anyways, I suppose it has been a fair bit of time since I last wrote here in my blog, and I apologize to my faithful readers that it has taken this long to get an update. Well, to make a long story short, of course I've been busy at my day job righting the wrongs and fighting the good fight. When I'm not working and I still have time to spend on the computer, I upload a few pictures to my own personal Fotozon Page.

A few days ago, I had some pizza with our neighbors from S. Africa and they told me they were involved with Facebook. Well, I've been following the facebook story for some time now, especially when my hometown company, Microsoft, dropped a quarter billion USD$$ on them a month ago. I was meaning to create an application for facebook to add the Taiwan POD to their pages, and I'm proud to say it's already done! If you're on face book, you can use this link to sign up for my application!

It was actually really easy to get started, but the biggest hurdle was figuring out how to update the user's profiles automatically every day. I believe this part is finshed now, and I hope if you are on facebook, you can add my app. Much to my surprise, there are already 19 users . Apparently this new medium of distrubution has its merits. All I need to do now is create a 75 pixel logo and I will submit the Taiwan Picture of the Day application to the Facebook directory.

Thank you all who have supported this application and project through the months and I hope it will take off big time now. After this is done, I will start looking into the "open social" project over at Google just so we are covering all our bases.