* * * * *
                                        
         I guess I can add “Facebook App Developer” to my résumé now …
                                        
I didn't expect my “proof-of-concept [1]” to take as long to integrate into
mod_blog [2] as it did, and I do apologize to my friends on MyFaceSpaceBook
[3] who got spammed earlier today with, frankly, bizarre posts as I attempted
to debug the new code. It's working, but there's still a worrying memory
overwrite buried deep in the code that I've yet to fully squash (“fixing” a
bug by reordering function calls is not a fix, but a temporary workaround).

But I have accomplished my goal of updating MyFaceSpaceBook automatically. It
involved:

  1. Registering the application at MyFaceSpaceBook (you need to have a
     MyFaceSpaceBook account to see the page, otherwise I'd link to the
     page).
  2. Manually entering the appropriate URL (Uniform Resource Locator) [4]
     (from the “User-Agent Flow” section) to give my “application” access to
     my MyFaceSpaceBook account.
  3. Manually entering another URL [5] to give my “application” access to
     update the MyFaceSpaceBook status.
  4. Adding the code to authenticate as an application [6], which gives me
     the token required for the last step.
  5. And finally, adding the code to update my status [7].

The first three steps took several hours on the development site [8] (which
is horribly organized by the way—it's taken about an hour just to find the
pages again for this post) and the last two took a couple of hours today to
properly add the code (to add configuration options, pass in the actual
status text, the final 10% of the code that tends to take 90% to finish).

And with luck, this will post properly.

I can only hope.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2010/11/30.1
[2] https://boston.conman.org/about/
[3] http://www.facebook.com/
[4] http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/javascript
[5] http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/#requesting-extended-permissions
[6] http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/#authenticating-as-an-application
[7] http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/status
[8] http://developers.facebook.com/docs/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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