Facebook app experimenting
I haven’t had any reason to develop a full Facebook app yet, but since I was curious about their API I’ve been playing around with it. The SATS app was originally something I built years ago for my own webpage when I was a member of SATS (the gym). SATS’ search for classes didn’t have the interface I wanted, so I rearranged the search results a bit more to my liking. (It’s all ugly hacking, stripping data from an HTML result.) To my surprise, they haven’t changed their search functionality since then, so I ported the search to a Facebook app as an experiment. The app resides on my server and I rebuilt the whole front-end to return a JSON object with the data to show, then displaying it with FBML. I’d like to implement more of the existing search functionality, but as this has the status of being an ugly hack depending on SATS not rebuilding their search, I don’t think it’s worth the effort. Oh, and I think the app is buggy in IE at the moment.
After writing the SATS app I got curious about Google App Engine and wanted to do some sort of Hello World to test connecting GAE to a Facebook app. I built a very simple function just to display your friend list as an XML file.
The reason for this is that many of my friends complained about not being able to trace the people disappearing from their friend lists. This is also a convenient way to get the user ids for your friends if you’re developing an application and need test data. I’m not allowed to save versions of friend lists due to Facebook API user terms, but this way the users can save versions of their list to compare.
Comments OffFront-end – for Stardoll
Stardoll is a community where little girls (and boys) can play with “paper” dolls. As a user you create a me-doll that resembles (or doesn’t resemble) you, then you dress and accessorize your doll. You also have a “suite” to fill with furniture and pets. You can design your own clothes, buy designer clothing for your doll and have parties in special party chat rooms that you furnish and decorate yourself.
Other than that, Stardoll of course has all the common functionality found in most communites. The community has an astounding nearly 50 million users all over the world!
At Stardoll I coded front-end, which included HTML, CSS, JQuery, JSON, integrations with Flash and PHP.
Comments OffPå stan-bloggen – for DN @ Josh
På stan is a part of the large Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. The site has a blog, which is updated daily by the editorial staff. På stan-bloggen is probably most famous for “Strages youtubiana”, where Fredrik Strage listed the 100 best moment of rock as Youtube clips. For this he was awarded the Grand Journalist Prize, as innovator of the year.
The blog is built upon the XCAP community platform. Together with a great team of consultants from a number of different companies we integrated the blog with the CMS system Polopoly and hooked it up with the great design.
For my part, I wrote Spring controllers, customized the XCAP Admin so that the editors could write blog entries (this is normally done by community users, from within a community) and built customized search functionality.
When På stan-bloggen turned out to be a success we implemented the blog for the main DN site as well. For På stan I’ve also built the XCAP comment and rating implementation and an import function to retrieve comments from the site Eniro.
Comments OffSpraydate – for Lycos @ Kärlek & Kapital
Spraydate was one of the first dating communities in Sweden and is still very popular with over 700 000 members.
During two months in 2006 I did a full redesign of the site having only the CSS to play with. A challenging assignment during which I learned a lot about CSS tweaks.
Comments Offfeminetik.se
feminetik.se is a feminist community and discussion forum that flourished around 2004. It was founded by Josefine Alvunger and was originally a small ASP forum, when I stumbled upon it. I was a student, loving web programming but was starting to feel that school assignments just weren’t inspiring enough.
Josefine, back then a gender student, needed someone to do the programming of her visions and I wanted a playground. It was a perfect match. feminetik.se is built entirely by me, from scratch, in PHP and has played a large role in my learning programming.
feminetik.se has over 300 000 forum entries and has quite a lot of extra functionality to simplify the work of the moderators and hosts of the website, who can easily warn, mail or block users. The members have profile pages and guestbooks, and the site has image galleries and event calendars.
When I started to work full time and didn’t have time to develop feminetik.se anymore, Niklas Udd continued developing new functionality, such as feminetik’s themes and chat. Today I host the site on my server, but don’t do any programming.
Comments OffStudio55 – for MTV3 @ Josh
Studio55 is a popular Finnish TV show airing every morning Monday to Friday. The target audience is men and women over the age of 55.
The Studio55 community is an implementation of the community platform XCAP. I was technical project owner, back-end developer and responsible for the server environment. We worked in a small team, where the front-end developers were located in Finland. I built a customer specific solution to make existing XCAP modules work together for the special day views on the site and functionality to import and cache XML data from an existing CMS-system into the site.
Comments OffFejmTV – for TV4 @ Josh
FejmTV was a video community for teenagers, where the users could upload their own movies and leave comments.
Unfortunately, with sites like Youtube out there, the community didn’t manage to keep the target group interested enough, so the site is now closed.
FejmTV was one of my first projects at Josh, in which I was a member of the front-end team.
Comments OffSubject – for MTV3 @ Josh
Subject is a very popular Finnish community, connected to the TV channel MTV3. Users can upload videos and images and write eachother messages, but it is the forum that is the most used part with over one million entries in just a couple of years. The forum is the place to be to discuss the Finnish version of the Big Brother show and Idol!
For Subject I’ve been adding extra functionality such as photo galleries for the users and doing bug fixes when problems have appeared. I also handled the releases to the numerous servers.
Comments OffExpressen Nöje – for Expressen @ Josh
Nöje is the more relaxed part of the Swedish newspaper Expressen. It has a community where users originally could find events in an eventcalendar that imported events from the ticket booking site Ticnet. They could also “own” celebrity pages and write reviews about for example movies.
I was part of the team that built the front-end for Expressen Nöje, and I also built the functionality for the eventcalendar and the review engine in the community platform XCAP, on which the community is built.
Comments OffNellad – for Sydsvenskan @ Josh
Nellad was a video community for teenagers in the Skåne area of Sweden. The Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan wanted to have a youth community and the goal was to get all kids playing in garage bands to have their bands on Nellad. In the beginning the site was popular, thanks to a band contest arranged by Sydsvenskan, but after the contest was over, the interest dropped. Nellad couldn’t compete with the larger sites with similar functionality, such as MySpace, and is now closed down.
In this project I implemented most of the functionality, customizing the XCAP modules to work for Nellad, trying to make the front-end coders’ work as easy as possible. I handled releases and servers and built functionality to make existing content from Sydsvenskan and cms content seamlessly integrate with the community.
Comments Offjosh.se – @ Josh
Josh Sthlm is the company where I worked for two and a half years building communities. Their website was recently completely remade and the CMS functionality from Josh’s community platform XCAP is now used.
I made the system completely configurable for this site, so that no code needs to be changed when someone wants to add a module with information to any part of the website.
When I worked at Josh I developed new modules for the platform as well as building customer implementations. Examples of my work is the eventcalendar and the review engine.
Comments OffKATTIS – for KTH
KTH Automated Teaching Tool is an automatic judge, correcting programming assignment solutions sent in by students. The code is compiled and if there were no compilation errors the execution is timed and KATTIS checks that the code does what it should.
KATTIS had been around for a few years, known as Marvin, when the need for a web interface started to rise. Until then the solutions had been sent in by mail.
I built the web interface in PHP while I was a student at KTH. It handles programming assignments, students, teachers and courses. The student can view her own code directly in the browser, with syntax highlightning. The teachers connected to the course the student belongs to can also review the code.
Comments OffMedlearn
MedLearn is a health care education company using their website as an information channel towards their students and as a way to market themselves.
In 2006, a make-over of their website was needed as the information was chaotic, duplicated and very difficult to find. My mission was to make the website a bit easier to navigate and to make sure the site followed their graphic profile.
Comments OffMac OS X widget – for ONE Media
Widget targeting art directors and people working with PR. It included functionality such as a lorem ipsum (dummy text) generator and tools for converting formats.
My mission was to implement the functionality wanted, using the design supplied.
Comments Off
Networks
