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] /boston/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/

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