Part 2 – The Facebook Tools

The tools developers use help them in many different ways.  In the previous post I touched on the Graph API Explorer This tool provides you with a great way to check the values of Facebook Graph Objects and query interesting things about them.  For example when querying the Graph API explorer with a page I built, some very interesting information is given back to me about it:

As you can see, there is a wealth of information here.  You can query the API for virtually any Object as long as you know it’s ID.  All permissions are respected, so in this example I happen to be an administrator for that page and as such a greater level of details is given to me then it would for you for example.  Try it and see: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET&path=403281633034885.

The next tool I want to talk about is the “Debugger”  This tool is crucial for any Facebook developer.  With this tool you provide a URL and Facebook crawl it and present any information it can learn about the target.  The Facebook Crawler looks for specific tags and can learn about the provided URL based on these tags.  For example, in this screen shot below I’ve told the Object Debugger to report what it sees from http://www.bing.com:

As you can see it can pick up images, titles, etc, however, if you provide more details in the form of meta tags as seen in the above screen shot.  Here is a zoomed view for better details:

This debugger is a fantastic tool if you would like to see what the “Facebook Scrapper” sees when it lands on a URL.

In addition to the debugger, there is also an access token tool located here.  It will automatically pull and display any access tokens that belong to pages and applications that you are an administrator of.  This is a very useful tool for easily determining a page or an application access token. 

Access Tokens In Detail

There are different types of tokens, each of which serves a different purpose.  When you login to Facebook as a normal user, you are using your own access token, this is refereed to as a user access token.  With this token an application can query the graph API or even post things to Facebook on your behalf.  When you post something to your timeline, it’s done using the /feed end point (more on that later) using your access token.  If you are an Administrator of a Facebook page, you may utilize the page access token to post to /feed but the difference is the post will show up as being posted by the page, instead of by you.  An application access token allows actions to be taken on behalf of an application.

Here is an example of an entry posted to my test page that I use for testing the application I build at work, this is a post to the /feed endpoint using a page access token:

Here is the very same post, on the same page using my user access token:

Notice one has the picture of the page, and one has my profile picture as well as my name next to it.  As far as application access tokens go, this allows you to do things like:  “Application Name Likes this Post” for example, The Real Estate Agent Directory is an application the company I work for produces and using the application access token, someone liked my page:

So that is the difference between the different types of access tokens, these examples of course do not define all the things that can be done with these various tokens, but this is just a small example of how they work and their purpose.

Another useful tool is the “Object Browser” this tool allows you to browse any “Open Graph” objects that are attached to your application and will even show you URL’s that Facebook has scrapped as well as the JSON data associated with it.  This tool can come in handy when creating custom objects for your application.

One last useful tool is the “JavaScript Test Console” this tool allows you to code up some JavaScript and do various things to it, such as execute it and save it.   There is even a drop down for changing the mode:

I strongly recommend you tinker with the “Examples” link as this gives you examples on many of the Facebook JavaScript SDK capabilities and you can play with them right in the console.

All of these tools can be found at here.  I suggest checking it out if you are doing any sort of Facebook Application development.

That about wraps up this post.  Next post we’ll dig into some C# code and how I prefer to serialize and de-serialize the JSON data coming to and from Facebook while using the C# Facebook SDK and the Newtonsoft Json Library.This library combined with the C# SDK makes communicating with Facebook a real breeze.

Thanks for reading and I hope you’ve found this post useful.

Part 1 – Introduction and some background information

It has been a great deal of time since my last post and many, many things have transpired since then.  For over a year now I’ve been building applications on Facebook and it’s been quite the journey and I’ve learned a great deal!  If you’re interested feel free to read on… More...

People that are close to me know how much of a complete Tron fanatic I am.  I’ve always loved the Tron movies, even today, watching Tron made in 1982 is still a great story.  Disney took a heck-of-risk as I mentioned in my previous post discussing some Tron history.  Unfortunately in 1982 I don’t believe the world was quite ready for a move quite that advanced and it wound up as a box office flop.  Though over the years the movie has gained a huge cult following.

Enter Tron: Legacy

With legacy I think Disney has met with success.  Skeptics would argue that it didn’t make enough money at the theater to warrant another Tron movie and to some extent that’s a reasonable argument but it’s flawed.   Disney reported a 54% earnings increase and pointed at Tron: Legacy as well as a few other titles.  According to this post on Feb 8th, 2011: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118031762  had this to say:

Clearly this movie is viewed as a success by Disney which hopefully means more of it!  I will say this much, I’ve been keeping a close eye on “Tron” in twitter and it’s almost CONSTANTLY being discussed.  Mashable posted about this here: http://mashable.com/2010/12/28/true-grit-fockers-tron-twitter/.  I’ve been keeping tabs for a while now and as proof I’ve taken several screen shots at various random intervals check out the traffic:

These three screen shots, from left to right.  On the left one the time frame was Sunday Jan1st @ 1:17am EST.  Someone would rather watch Tron and Inception than go to sleep.   The second screen shot was Monday Jan 16th at about 5:30pm. The third is from Today the 20th at about 4:30ish or so.  If you carefully examine the time stamps, there is not a great deal of time that passes between mentions, granted 100% of them are NOT Tron: Legacy but the point is that for the last twenty days I’ve been watching this pretty closely and the traffic is nearly constant.  Obviously people are talking about this even after over a year now the movie STILL has nearly a constant stream of twitter traffic discussing it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again in an annoyingly huge font:

Disney, we LOVE TRON!

I an anxious for the animated series to hit Disney XD and am very hopeful that we’ll see another movie!

Not that my web sites get enough traffic to warrant doing this, but it’s still the principal.  The primary codejockey.net web site as well as this blog site will go dark later this morning starting at 8am to protest SOPA/PIPA.

An annoying trend that I believe is making it more difficult for gamers is that everyone is now trying to build their own “Steam” system.  For EA Games, I now have to create an account and use their launcher.  This evening I got an email from UbiSoft whom is also introducing their own system.  The problem: Of course these vendors aren’t going to cannibalize their own products and use Steam which makes me, the consumer quite unhappy.  Rather than go to one place to play all my cloud hosted games, I have to go to many.  Not to mention adding even more user names and passwords to my already ridiculously long list.  Why can’t these guys also publish though Steam.  Steam is a proven platform that has been around for many many years and it serves as a great, single place, to house, play and store all my games.

Please can you game publishers stop trying to get into social networking and stick to your core competency: Creating good games?  Can we please stop the mass amounts of user names, passwords, and all the other extremely annoying authentication tactics?  Can’t everyone just interface with a platform that already has a huge subscription base?  Why try to re-create something that has this many gamers on-line nearly all the time:

It’s taken Steam a good number of years to get that number, good luck matching it!  Just use Steam to make my life easier, PLEASE!

Just in time for me to get RC1 completed before the end of the year!

After hearing a few reports from friends of mine, and also starting to experience the problem personally I noticed BingPaper started crashing.  This turned out to be an easy fix and tonight I finally got a chance to get it fixed, tested, checked in, and published to the CodePlex site.  If you have BingPaper and have had problems with it crashing lately, please grab the latest update to make that problem go away. More...

Mozy has been both a positive and a negative experience over the years.  I’ve run into issues where the restore was corrupted, and a request of a different restore in time fixed the issue, annoying, especially given how long it seemed to take for my restore to be available for download, then to have to wait for the download to finish.  The Mozy client is so poorly written that I didn’t bother to install it on my newest laptop as it loves to PEG the hard drive and I got very tired of that problem alone.More...

I was going to write up a bunch of steps with code, screen shots, config settings, etc for working with log4net, but it turns out someone, a while ago, has beat me to the punch.  The articles I found are fantastically done and I see no reason to re-write what someone has already done a superb job of doing.  So without further ado, here is a link to a “landing” page the author created with links to all his log4net articles.  This link should wind up in your favorites!

http://www.beefycode.com/post/Log4Net-Tutorials-and-Resources.aspx

The codejockey.net domain will be down from 5/26/2011 through 5/31/2001 for various upgrades, DNS entries, etc.  I would have warned about this downtime but I honestly don’t think the traffic level on my blog (especially given I rarely blog any more) likely didn’t warrant a long notice.

Thank you,

Eric

As you will notice, I’ve had the picture I’m posting below this text since 2009, but even to this day it’s funny to see.  At one point during the day (16:10 according to the date/time stamp on the photo) I needed to get some cash out of the ATM and I drove up to this screen: More...