July 18th, 2008 by Eddie Sullivan
Facebook made a splash a year or two ago when they opened up their API. Now developers could write applications that integrate with the site. Instantly, users -- many of whom had fled to Facebook from a spam-filled MySpace -- were inundated with Requests to battle ninjas and News Items bearing obscene pictures. To Facebook's credit, they did clamp down and put some restrictions on what apps can do. A few entertaining or useful applications have risen to the top, and the potential of the API is ready to be exploited. It's not an easy task for a developer, however.
In the next few Chicken Scratches posts, I'll talk about my experience developing two Facebook apps from scratch:
The Limerick Book, a site that works both in and outside of Facebook and allows users to share and rate Limericks, and
Play Scopa, a traditional Italian card game that users can play against each other in realtime (this one is not yet launched to the public).
This first post discusses some of the difficulties I have run into. In the next couple posts, I'll discuss how I dealt with them. First, to set the scene:
My setup
I am using the
Django web framework for my backend development, the latest SVN version running with Python version 2.4 on a shared host at
Dreamhost. In fact, it's the same server I use for this site and weblog. To connect Django to Facebook, I am using the nice
PyFacebook library, which is pretty mature, though I had to modify the code to support some of the latest features of the Facebook API.
And now, on to the perils.
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July 7th, 2008 by Eddie Sullivan
I have written two previous articles about how I edit Django template files in Emacs and XEmacs.
Here is
How
I edit Django templates. And here
is More
on editing Django templates in XEmacs. Here today is another
little tip that can be used in conjunction with those two other
posts or independently.
Django templates involve a lot of punctuation. Between the angle
brackets and slashes of HTML and the curly braces and percent
signs of the Django template language, it's enough to make your
pinky fingers hurt just thinking about it. Therefore any little
trick to reduce some of this typing burden can be
helpful. Presented here is some Emacs Lisp code to provide
auto-closing of Django template tags. So even if you still have
to type things like curly-brace percent-sign space ifequal blah
blah2 percent-sign close-curly-brace, you won't have to type the
{% endifequal %}. (Of course, if you're using
the abbrev tips I gave previously, you won't even need
to type the opening tag very often, but sometimes you still do.)
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