The project involved doing a complete rewrite of the code, which was originally written in PHP, and rewriting it in Ruby on Rails. The functionality of the application is more or less the same as it was before, except for a few added features that are primarily in the back-end to give Darren an easier way of administering the whole thing. We also updated the design from the old look to adapt the new look of the new ProBlogger design.

One of the primary reasons for doing this project is to give the back-end code a lot more extensibility, which is key in projects where you want to one day expand and improve on. Now that the thing’s written in Rails, there are a ton of possibilities which can be followed for the Job Board, some of which will be explored. So stay tuned for cool, new features to come!

I built this because I wanted to see when I made my WordPress posts, in a more graphical interface. I already used Google Calendar, so I would have loved to see my posts right in my calendar.

You can do that with my plugin – no configuration necessary! Just download it from me, upload it to your server, and then activate it in your WordPress plugins page. Then, navigate to http://www.kinggary.com/?ical (basically visit your blog, and then add ?ical at the end of the URL) to see the calendar). Then add this URL as an external iCal calendar to whatever calendar application you are using. In Google Calendar, for example, go to ‘Add’ and then ‘Add by URL’, and then just add the URL to the input box and hit Enter! And it’s done!

If you want to only show posts from a specific category, then add &category= to the end of the URL, with the category’s name at the end. An example would be http://www.kinggary.com/?ical&category=web

Download the plugin

A large number of the applications that I’ve built from the ground up with a partner (who wishes to remain nameless) consists of one group, which are basically TV shows, and another group, which contain several sports.

Some of our television shows applications include gems such as Dane Cook, Family Guy, and Harry Potter, just to name a few, with the first two reaching nearly 200,000 users each.

Our sports offerings include major sports including baseball, football, and hockey, with each passing the 100,000 users mark just recently.

The great thing about having a network of applications instead of one or two big ones is that they all help each other out in increasing the number of users for each one because of the heavy inter-linking going on between all of them.

We’ve been pushing out major updates every few days since we first launched these applications, and it’s been a wild ride so far. As long as we continue to please our users, I have no doubt that our growth rate will stay steady for quite some time.

With every new feature that we add to our applications, the stickiness gets better and better, which results in users returning to our applications, looking for more things to do.

So, that’s that. It’s what I’ve been working on recently. And hopefully some good will come out of it.

(A full list of all of our applications are listed at the top of every one of our applications, so if you feel like checking them out, then install one of our Sports applications for our sports apps, and one of our TV Shows applications for our TV Show apps.)

Developing for the Facebook platform is very different from other environments that I have worked with, including vBulletin when I was building forums, and WordPress when I was working at b5media, a blog network.

vBulletin made it easy to create new pages powered by the system by simply including a particular file in the new files that you created. A few more steps were required to keep the whole look-and-feel of your existing design into new pages.

WordPress made it even easier to create new pages by creating them right from the administration interface directly in your browser, without requiring you to ever muck in code.

Facebook actually, in a way, makes development somewhat more difficult because the results that you get in your browser isn’t always what you intended it to be when writing the HTML for it, or in some cases, the FBML offered by Facebook.

Certain tags are banned, whereas functionality is unique in certain areas. For example, you can only have one link in certain places such as the title of every Mini-Feed item that appears in a user’s profile, and Facebook offers its own set of tags, called FBML tags, which do Facebook-specific things such as returning the name of the current user.

Some things that I enjoy about working on the Facebook platform include the fact that I don’t have to build an entire navigational system from scratch. I don’t have to create an application’s look and feel because Facebook already provides that. Any navigation that I introduce that doesn’t use Facebook’s default navigational system provided by FBML will more likely confuse users more than help them, because to them, they are still entirely within Facebook when using Facebook Applications, and nowhere else.

Another great thing with the Facebook Platform is that an authentication system is provided right out of the box, with users who have profiles that are already filled out with tons of useful information that can greatly richen their experience with your application.

It’s been interesting developing applications so far, and hopefully I’ll be able to reveal some of the stuff that I’ve built sometime soon!

After building this, I found a post that was made over at TechCrunch which discusses about how it would be interesting if WordPress could have similar functionality to what Stumble Upon provides, so I hope that this fulfills that need.

What it does

It basically adds functionality to your WordPress blog which allows visitors to view a randomly selected post on your blog, with a higher probability of choosing popular posts, and with the option of only showing recent posts. You also have the option of giving recent posts more chances to be shown to visitors if you think that your most recent posts are more interesting to your visitors.

Example

To see how this works, click on the links in the sidebar on this page which say “random post” and “random recent post”, which are right below the search box. They are self-explanatory.

How to install

The plugin does have a requirement, which is the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin (install it like any other plugin; just upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and then activate it in your admin panel), so go and install that first.

When that’s done, download and install my plugin like a normal plugin, too. And you’re done! No configuration is required.

There are two important links that you need to link to. They are:

• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble
  • Replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL, of course. This URL will show the visitor a random post but it gives a higher weight to popular posts, which increases the chances that visitors will land on a popular post. This is a really cool way of hand-holding your visitors to the great posts on your blog, without linking them to specific posts.
• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble&date
  • Again, replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL. This URL will point your visitor to a random post, again, based on the post’s popularity, but also, based on how recent the post is. More recent posts will have a higher chance of being shown to your visitors. This is especially useful for blogs where posts are more news- and events-based, such as TechCrunch. It is more interesting to read posts that have been written in the past month rather than posts that have been written a few years ago on blogs such as these.

Anyways, please, PLEASE let me know how well this works for you. I have only tested this on a handful of blogs, and so far, it has worked great on them. But, if this plugin brings up posts on YOUR blog that are not popular at all, then do let me know! I’ll try my best to fix them ASAP.

So, I hope you enjoy this plugin!

History

• 07/07/15 – 1.0
  • plugin release

First of all, here’s how it will look like in the end (I’ve hidden some plugins that I’d prefer not to appear in the screenshot):

I can’t call this a WordPress Plugin because it requires that you modify some files instead of having me just give you a file to upload and active. The reason for this is because WordPress doesn’t make it easy for me to implement this functionality any other way. What this means is that you have to modify one file yourself (which is completely harmless!) and whenever you upgrade your installation of WordPress, you’ll have to re-implement this modification again.

I submitted this modification as a patch to WordPress and they may or may not implement it as a built-in feature – who knows? If not, then it’d at least be nice of them to give me a hook to use so I can convert this modification into a plugin.

Anyways, on with the show!

Installing this modification

If you know how to use patch files, then download and use this file on your installation of WordPress.

Otherwise, to install this modification, open up your /wp-admin/plugins.php file and find this line:

echo '<h3>Plugins Table of Contents for ' . (count($plugins) / 2) . ' plugins</h3><table id="plugins-table-of-contents"><tr>';

$k = 1;
$starting_plugin = $plugins_per_table;

for ($i = 1; $i <= $table_columns; $i++)
{
echo '<td valign="top"><ul>';
for ($j = $k; $j <= $starting_plugin; $j++)

{
$plugins[$k]['order'] = $k;
echo '<li>' . $k . '. <a href="plugins.php#plugin-' . $k . '">' . $plugins[$k]['Name'] . '</a></li>';

if ($k == $number_of_plugins)
break;
$k++;
}
$starting_plugin += $plugins_per_table;
echo '</ul></td>';

}

echo '</tr></table>';

for ($i = 1; $i <= $number_of_plugins; $i++)

{
unset($plugins[$i]);
}

• Remove empty “By: ” line for plugins without an author specified
• Don’t link plugin names if no URL is specified
• Link to jump directly to a comment in the “Edit Comments” panel
• Table of Contents for all plugins

I’d like to thank Tony for giving me the opportunity to write there – it’s been a great experience the whole time!

Every person there will have equal equity in the company that they build. This is absolutely insane – 70 equal founders of this one company where they just decided on the company’s first product in one meeting? This is going to be one heck of an interesting experiment to keep an eye on!Personally, I don’t think that anything great will come out of this group. No matter how great every one of them are as developers, it is near impossible to co-ordinate well with that many people.

I predict that people in the group will end up befriending only a handful of people – maybe 3-4 – and then code a small module of the final product together. If they do work like this, then they have a chance of building something that’s more useful than what a thousand monkeys could produce if they jammed out on keyboards!

One thing that I can picture, though, is that many of them will build startups of their own with new people that they meet from the experience, which I would imagine will be the most valuable thing to come out of the whole event.

You can see them working, live, at Ustream.

Why do I say this?

Because it gets annoying when scrolling through a Facebook profile that is several pages long (I’ve seen a lot that are easily more than 10 pages long if printed out).

Facebook is starting to look like a (more organized) MySpace every day – now if only there was a table of contents at the top of every profile that helped you quickly jump to certain sections of the profile, then it would help browsing considerably – AND it would show you what the person had on their profile, just in case you wanted to find out what their favorite music was, if you wanted to post on their wall, or if they were going to the same music concert that you are going to next week!

Here is an example of how it could look like:

Unfortunately, ALL of these applications WERE installed on a friend’s profile. You know who you are .

I won’t mention any specific Application names right now, but hopefully we’ll hit the half-million-users point soon in terms of the total number of users that we have across all of our Applications. A few of our applications are even in the top 100 most popular application list.

You may also have noticed that my Facebook profile has recently been having a major make-over. No, it’s not turning into a MySpace profile! I’ve just been testing out so many Facebook Applications that I end up just leaving them there

I’m also building a few Applications for other people as well; a few are in the education world, helping students with their notes, and others are more oriented towards the business-minded people.

Hopefully I’ll have fancy graphs and statistics to show in the near future

First of all, I’d like to thank them for giving me the opportunity to work there. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I take away with me experiences and relationships that I will use for the rest of my life.

In a way, this event is perfect for me. Now that I have more time available to myself, I’ve invested it into my own projects that I have planned for quite some time (most of which are still under wraps!) I also have several projects that I have been working on but had to put on hold because of my work at b5media, so now I can spend more time to focus on them.

Anyways, thanks, muchos gracias, to everyone who has been involved with my experience over at b5media. It’s been fun, but I can only work at the same place for so long!

Plus, I get bored easily, so I try to spice things up by changing the platforms that I work on and such (I primarily used WordPress over at b5media). Which, leads me to my next point… I’m building Facebook Applications now. Read on by clicking here!

This is unfortunate. I have had similar-but-not-as-bad issues with the Facebook platform and with Applications that I have on there, which I will post about hopefully sometime in the near future.

I think that it’s important to take advantage of the news feeds of your application’s users that are available to you because these are published to the friends of all of your users. This will have to be the next big goal for Facebook Application developers because Facebook has now add a limitation to only allow up to 10 invitations per application to be sent out by each user, per day.

This is very disappointing indeed.

Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever I write a new blog post, I always think about which category suits the post best. I keep the number of categories that I have at a minimal level so that an appropriate category for every blog post is immediately obvious to me.

My rule of thumb for naming categories is, if you’ve got two categories that can overlap each other in an obvious manner, then you’ve got to change something there. Either merge the two categories, or remove one and expand the remaining one. I also tend to review my categories every few months, and if I have a category with less than 10 posts, then I ax it and merge the posts with that category into another category.

Go check it out!

It certainly was a surprise to see the changes at first. I used Google Docs back in the day, when it was still Writely (and I conversed with the team fairly regularly, giving suggestions, some which were implemented and still are.) So, I was used to the old view.

This new look incorporates folders, which are new, as well as tags, which existed before. Does this mean that tags aren’t working out as well as Google had hoped? TechCrunch poses the question to Gmail to see if they will also implement folders. I personally much prefer Google’s ‘labels’, as they call it, which are essentially just tags. I like these because they give me all the flexibility in the world, and I’m sure most of you who have worked with tags before know what I’m talking about.

It’s nice to see that Google still gives care to these products. I’m waiting for the day when I can finally ditch MS Office for good and move completely to Google Docs. They implemented graphs in Google Spreadsheets not too long ago, and that was one major step forward, but without the powerful features that Microsoft Excel has, Google Docs & Spreadsheets still has some ways to go before being more than a convenience for me.

TechCrunch mentions that being a member of a social network is thought to be mutually exclusive, meaning that there can only be one major growth leader in the world of social networks. With Facebook booming as much as it has been lately, one would assume that other networks such as MySpace and Friendster would slow down in growth, but that is not the case. I somewhat agree on this.

The one thing that I do completely agree on with VentureBeat is that social networks are finding new markets in places where there previously were no real reigning social network to begin with. Places like the Philippines and Malaysia have people that are attracted to Friendster, which is probably partially fueled by the fact that Friendster is already one of the social networks of choice in China, whereas Facebook is not nearly as popular as it is in the United States.

This isn’t going to be nearly as big as Twitter; not even a quarter of the popularity. Audio is just not as easy to glance over than text.

Podcasting, for example, has gotten relatively big, but blogs are still massive compared to podcasting, which is partially why podcasting startups such as Odeo didn’t do nearly as well as they would have hoped for. I would imagine that podcasts take up less than 5% of all existing blogs. The same will go for TwitterGram.

People have been saying that this is in response to Facebook, but in my opinion, if done properly, an application could be developed that would merge the best of both worlds from Facebook and LinkedIn to create a hybrid of sorts. Now THAT could be potentially a very useful application to many people, including myself!

(From radr)

When you’ve got the audience that Facebook has (20 million unique users each and every month, and counting) and you give them all access to your application, which is hosted on your own servers, then something has got to give if your application becomes even mildly popular.

An excellent case of this is the Facebook Application, “Where I’ve Been“, which allows you to create a map of the world and highlight what countries you’ve visited. The creator, Craig Ulliott, says that his application has been installed by nearly half a million users, and the bandwidth costs are nearing $500 a month. That’s a lot of money, considering that he doesn’t make a cent from the application (besides the fact that he solicits PayPal donations in the application).

One blogger believes that Facebook should start a revenue sharing program to help cover costs incurred by the application developer, to make it more fair. This sounds like an acceptable solution; I’d like to see independent developers be able to develop Facebook applications, let them become successful, and not run into issues paying for hosting when the application actually becomes popular.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

I’ve written a few posts in the past on Blog Herald, showing how you can make different changes for your WordPress admin by modifying the CSS file for it.

Being able to modify the CSS file to make quick design changes to your WordPress admin is very useful indeed, but the problem is when you upgrade your version of WordPress, the wp-admin.css file is replaced with the newer version because it’s not considered a file that should be modified by users.

Here’s where a new plugin that I came across comes in. It’s called the WordPress admin themer plugin, and what it does is simple. It allows you to create a separate wp-admin.css file that does not require modifying the default wp-admin.css file.

If you do a search on pretty much any website at Technorati, you’ll see that they have it listed there. Examples include Google, Yahoo!, and MSN – all of them ranked 0, because they are not considered blogs by Technorati. How does it discern the difference?

If anyone has any ideas, then feel free to post them in the comments!

As a web developer, one thing that I’ve been curious about is whether or not Safari also brings with it special Mac fonts and improved graphics to Windows users, and it turns out that it does, as CNET points out at Safari ushers in better browser colors.

Safari for Windows “supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors.” This is especially good for viewing color-rich images on the web, especially high quality photos.

One thing that I am particularly excited about is that Safari for Windows finally brings fonts that were previously only available on Macs, to Windows. For example, my own blog uses the Lucida Grande font, a very elegant and popular font among sites such as WordPress.com, which is only available on Macs. For Windows users, they see the Verdana font instead as an alternative.

Safari for Windows contains a large set of fonts that were previously Mac-exclusive, to Windows, including Lucida Grande. This is great news for web designers because it now provides a larger group of users that can see the fonts that web designers plan on using as their site’s primary font.

He wants them to add “Through the web” as another choice.

My feeling is that most people don’t use the option of choosing how you know someone on Facebook, even though I’ve advocated positively for this feature before, the reason being because many people add new friends on Facebook on a fling and so in fact, do not give value to new friends added.

Even for the few that DO use this option, though, personally I think there are actually too many options to choose from right now. Facebook should consolidate the options so that there are few, and with few overlaps so that the option that you should choose is obvious. This should be done primarily because Facebook’s userbase is quickly growing to be composed of more people than simply college students.

This is not true. 307 simply states the number of Applications that Facebook deems is allowed to be in the Directory, meaning that these are high-quality applications that they believe gives value to most Facebook users. Facebook Application developers can still create Applications, but they are not listed in the Directory unless approved by Facebook.

When people look at the number “307″, they believe that there is a small number of Applications available and that there’s still the chance to create new Applications without competing with others.

This is also not true, since, as I mentioned above, Applications don’t need to be listed in the Directory in order to be used. There are already probably thousands of Facebook Applications available to be used right now.

I’ve noticed that the number of total Applications in the Facebook Directory hasn’t changed in the past few weeks, and so I’m guessing that they’ve received so many submissions that they’ve finally reached the point where they temporarily stop accepting new Applications to list.

This is obviously a disappointment to most Facebook Application developers, because the possibility to quickly propagate a newly created Application to a large number of users is gone. The primary way now to do this now is to proactively advertise your Application on a popular website, in order to gain the traction needed so that it eventually self-propagates.

It’ll be interesting to see if new Applications will be accepted in the near future. I predict that it’ll be a few weeks at the very least before we see this; I’m guessing that it’s not at the very top of their list of todos.

The article gives examples such as iLike’s Facebook application, with over 6 million registered users, and Safari, which has had over 1 million downloads since its launch a few days ago.

This basically makes a point that most internet users don’t care if something is web 2.0 or not; they will use it as long as it’s useful to them.

The main thing that we have to remember is to stop building web applications that are supposedly geared towards a web 2.0 audience, and instead, build things that are useful.

I want to stop seeing a new todo list being released every week; or, if you feel an urge to release one, then add in some useful functionality, such as Todoist, which is my personal todo list of choice.

What are your thoughts on the whole web 2.0 thing? Do you think we’re nearing the end as it becomes integrated into the rest of the ‘mainstream web’?

Kevin Rose of Digg and Revision3/Diggnation fame is leading the pack in terms of number of votes by an extremely large margin, with 293,422 (the runner-up is Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio, with 90,229 votes.) Even with the large number of votes, Kevin is only in 9th place in terms of his rating, whereas Mel is 5th.

In the ratings department, Justin Kan from Justin.tv is leading the pack with a 88/100 rating, with the always egoistic Jason Calacanis formerly of Weblogs Inc. at 80/100.

The thing that I’m most surprised about is the massively disproportionately number of votes that Kevin has received, considering that there are other people in the list that are much more well known than him, including Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc., Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

I guess this goes to show just how far the power of the Digg effect can come into play?

I’m talking about the upcoming Webware awards, of course!

The button shown above is a common image seen on websites that have been nominated by the website in a total of 10 different categories; in the end, a total of 100 of the ‘best web 2.0 products’ will be announced on June 18, this coming Monday.

This is a great way for Webware to increase its popularity dramatically because I’ve been seeing websites that have been nominated for an award to link to Webware in order to get more votes; examples include TypePad, Drupal, NewsGator, and ConceptShare. Some websites only link by posting about it on their blog, whereas some others make a big deal out of it and add a link to Webware directly from their homepage.

To be fair, Webware is owned by CNET, which has quite a foothold in the web world already, but even if we look past that, it looks as though the Webware 100 is really working out for them, eh?

I’ve posted about the non-technical side of the plugin and the benefits that he gained from the plugin before, so in this post, I will walk through how a plugin like this is created, and the typical workflow and thinking that goes behind creating something like this.

This is a WordPress plugin, but it uses some special WordPress functions that I have never seen used in an existing plugin before. Hopefully this post will inspire WordPress plugin developers to use these functions more in future plugins.

The most important thing about the plugin is the wp_insert_post() function that I use. This is used to create new posts in the blog, just by using code and by passing an array to it, containing the data necessary.

The plugin basically revolves around this one function, because when a new item is submitted with the GWP (Group Writing Project) form on ProBlogger, it actually modifies an existing post. It determines which post to modify based on the post’s title, which is currently Group writing project – LATEST.

The wp_insert_post() WordPress function is not documented at all, so I’ll explain how it’s used. It helps if you already know how to use general functions in PHP.

When using wp_insert_post(), you need to pass an array as the first and only argument to it, like so:

wp_insert_post($post);

$post is an array that must contain at least the following keys:

• post_author: the user ID of the blogger who is the post’s author; I set this to Darren’s ID
• post_title: the title of the post. If this is not set, I believe the post’s title is set to the ID number of the post
• comment_status: set this to either ‘open’ or ‘closed’; it will most likely be ‘open’
• post_content: the body of the post. This can be blank.
• ID: this is optional, but if it is set to an existing post’s ID, then you will be modifying an existing post instead of creating a new one.

That’s all you need to get it working. I hope the above has helped you out with your WordPress plugin endeavors!

I just checked the average number of Google searches that I make a day, and it turns out that I do nearly 200 Google searches a day. I also have a total of 28,555 Google searches since Google started tracking my searches.

Could YOU live a day without Google search? I know I can’t!