This summer Phil spent a couple of weeks rewriting the code to be a little easier to maintain. We reimplemented the code with Smarty and reimplemented the locational device to use FBJS instead of regenerating an image when someone clicked on the map (it’s much faster now).

If you need a starter app, check it out at http://code.google.com/p/facebook-athenaeum/.

If you need a good book on writing Facebook Applications, check out my book, Facebook API Developers Guide.

If you’re interested, you can check out the code at http://code.google.com/p/facebook-athenaeum. There are a few more features to add in, but it does work rather nicely, and a lot faster than our previous version. The slowest thing is the asynchronous post to the MySQL server (the longest time we recorded was 111ms), but since that happens in the background, you don’t even notice.

I’ve been offline for a while (and there are a flurry of posts about that coming up), but I had a very strange thing happen yesterday. Earlier this year, I published the Facebook API Developer’s Guide. It seems to be selling reasonably well on Amazon…even broke the top 100 computer books for a couple of days.

Being it’s a book on Facebook, I’ve had a few folks add me as a friend and shoot me messages and ask some questions. It all seemed pretty cool, until yesterday. I got a note from a person in Tunisia who added me as a friend and asked a question. I sent a response thanking him for purchasing my book, and this is where I was a little taken aback. In fact, this was his exact response:

well, to be honest with you i got your book from a torrent site, i would have bought it if i wasnt living in Tunisia, I hope this won’t affect anything

I didn’t quite know what to say. He was nice enough to send the link to the torrent site, and apparently there are 41 seeders and 3 leechers.

At first, I was thinking of trying to get the site to remove the link, but I’ve been around long enough to know that doesn’t really stop anything. I have say that I’m still scratching my head on this one. I’m not sure if I’m flattered that there are people that think its worth stealing, offended that someone would under the pretense of purchasing my intellectual property ask a question (could have just asked, I’m a pretty nice guy), or mad that he stiffed me a 20% commission on a book.

Still trying to figure this one out…

It’s been a long while since I posted anything here. Things have been a bit hectic with the launching of a new institutional repository service (using DSpace), taking a computer graphics course (linear algebra, ray tracing, scientific visualization, etc.), and finishing up my book on the Facebook API.

This is the first book I’ve written and I have to admit it was far more of a task than I had first thought it would be. Not that the subject matter was very dense, but there were at least four major changes in the API that required an almost total rewrite of the code base for the examples. There were even a couple of sections that had to get cut because Facebook “fixed” their code because of security and user concerns (plus a lot of folks “abuse” some of the things you could do with the API).

There are some great Coldfusion resources for building Facebook applications in ColdFusion. The “un-official” ColdFusion client library for Facebook apps is at nearpersonal. There is also a RIAForge starter project for FBML (FBML is a tag based language for Facebook) named Facebook FBML Starter Kit.

So, if you’re wanting a short book that highlights some of the more common elements of developing Facebook applications, be sure to check out my book!

I’ve been kind of silent here as I’ve been trying to keep this blog at least somewhat focused on ColdFusion and I’ve been doing development in some different languages as of late (Java, PHP, and Ruby). However, when Facebook released their API for developers, my summer assistant Phil started hacking away at it and we’ve released our first app for Facebook: SwemTools.

It does a couple of things, provides a search interface for both the online catalog and our website, news feeds, hours, and a bit of a neat application based on Swem Signal that was created by Tom MacWright.

We’re still working on the code for the Signals part, but the idea is that on a map of the library, you’d be able to see where your friends are. Right now, you can see a dot where your friends are, but not who they are…but we’re working on a solution for it.

Anyway, if you’re on Facebook, check it out…you can add me as a friend too. ]]> http://www.liquidfoot.com/2007/06/14/facebook-api/feed/ 2