The new Facebook app creation flow is really confusing.

For developers, to add a app as a tab to another page, you  need to user the following URL:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL

next parameter should be your canvas page url.

Here you can see an option to add this app to your page.

Two months ago, I published a jQuery plugin to record audio from browser (without any Media server) called jRecorder

I got many responses and requests to maintain the code with new enhancements and some bug fixes.

Based on that, a new version (1.1) is released which has the capability to preview the recorded audio before sending to the server.

See the example implementation and documentation here.

Also I made this source open and available for anybody to develop at: https://github.com/sythoos/jRecorder/

Thanks

Sajith

The question is how can we do this ?

The trick here is, you need to create a page using iframe as you usually create FB app. In that iframe, you have your custom page fragment hosted somewhere else showing some copies/contents/offer etc.

Each time when Facebook load your url inside the iframe, Facebook do a POST to your domain signed_request as the parameter. The rest of the part you have to handle with your server side scripting.

Here mine is PHP:

<?php

$signed_request = $_REQUEST["signed_request"];
// $_POST also work, but better with $_REQUEST

list($encoded_sig, $payload) = explode(‘.’, $signed_request, 2);

$data = json_decode(base64_decode(strtr($payload, ‘-_’, ‘+/’)), true);

if (empty($data["page"]["liked"])) {

//write code here to show a non-liked situational contents
echo “You haven’t liked us yet”;

}
else {

//write code here to show contents for already liked people
echo “Hello Fan, here are your offers.”;

}
?>

You can download Adobe Edge Trail Version here.

Also see what others did with Adobe Edge here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/resources/

So, I thought to write something special and it is regarding the new website.

New theme, New WP Version, New Server,  New Logo, Mr Me is totally new

A PHP based tool to generate QR Code for your website URL.

http://qrcode-factory.com/

Now a days, the usage of QR code is higher and this is becoming one of the PR generating mechanisms.

QR code is another kind of bar code called matrix bar code.  QR stands for Quick Reader (source: WikiPedia)

The tool is created using PHP QR code library.

Use RedLaser Apps for mobile devices to read QR codes.

I recently started a new URL shortener service. If you’re bored with old short-url services, you can start using this
http://zip.ms

Here you can set your-own custom alias, than some random string.

I used Phurl library to create this website.

I have no spam guard added in the site, please be a real human, I trust you

– Sajith

As you all know recent changes in privacy issues made Facebook to change their basic API and added some security concerns. From my best practise, most of the old applications are safe, but you will be in trouble when you create new application. By default you cannot access user’s photos, profile pictures , albums etc. If you continue with old REST API, you may face this problem. You will get an empty array or json string when you call photos.getAlbums function.

If you test these functions from Facebook Console Tool:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/photos.getAlbums

It returns real value when you select old applications and returns empty string [] if you select your newly created Facebook app.

To get all those support, you need to use new Graph API

But if you follow the same steps mentioned in that official document, you will still get this empty string problem. Because, in the basic authentication call, there is no permission type is mentioned. You can only see a basic message with Allow or Deny button.

According to that document, as the part of authentication, you need to call this url with your client id and redirect url and it returns an access_token after a #

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?
    client_id=...&
    redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/oauth_redirect

You need to use this access_token to request all other functions, eg:

https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=...

This call will work for most of the requests except photos or albums. So the mistake in these calls are the permission.

Here is the correction:

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?
    client_id=...&
    redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/oauth_redirect&perms=publish_stream,user_photos

Here we pass perms parameter to set different permission and if you use the access_token after this request , you can access user photos and albums. You can see another permission popup with album and photo access.

Here is the list of such extended permissions in Facebook.

This is the problem when you use new Javascript SDK for graph API, or when you try to integrate these API in PHP or PERL or any other Server side scripting language from the scratch.

If you use new Facebook PHP Graph SDK , you cannot get these problems, but there is still another hidden problem if you continue testing code by the example provided by them.

It is my next POST . See you at there

Thanks

Sajith

Like the old REST API, you don’t need to add 2-3 files for Facebook PHP SDK. The new graph api comes in a single file which is located at http://github.com/facebook/php-sdk/

Copy the facebook.php file in to your webroot and include this file in your php code.

require_once(‘facebook.php’);

To work fully functional, you need CURL and JSON installed in your server. To check this use phpinfo() function.

To make sure, these missing is the main problem, add  exit(‘Curl error’); just above the line   throw new Exception(‘Facebook needs the CURL PHP extension.’); in facebook.php file.

Same for JSON.

The Linux way of installing CURL is :

sudo apt-get install curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl

To install JSON in your linux machine, follow these steps:

1. pecl install json
2. Add json.ini file in /etc/php.d/
3. edit json.ini (in VI) and add this line: xtension=json.so
4. Save the file and restart appache (/etc/init.d/httpd restart)  or apache2 restart depends on your linux OS

See the example.php file in php-sdk from Github, if you call getSession function, you only get a NULL string if you are not logged in proper way. So I recommend to redirect into login page if there is no session available.

Here is the change:

if (! $facebook->getSession()) {

header(‘Location: ‘.$facebook->getLoginUrl());

}

Then try the rest of the part as per example.php , it will work

Good Luck

Sajith

If you aim to create a multi-language  website using PHP + Mysql , remember the following tips.

• You can use mysql database for this purpose rather than using separate language files as usual content management system does.
• You can create a table with following structure for this purpose.Table: muli-lang
  string_id:
  page_id:
  en:
  arb:
  fr:
• Here string_id is the code for getting content  eg: welcome_message
  page_id is for saving in which page the content belongs to.  eg: home_page, login_page etc
  In field en, you have to enter the message in english,eg: Welcome to my website
  In arb field you can enter the corresponding translation in arab. eg: مرحبا بكم في موقعي
• If you need to add more languages, it is just adding one more column to this table and put all translated values.
• Write a class or functions in PHP to retrieve all the informations.
  eg: function get(language_id, page_id) returns corresponding message
• Use session to save lang value. For example if you switch to french, set a variable lang= fr and use this variable to decide which column is to access from multi-lang table.eg: the sql will be , SELECT $lang FROM multi-lang WHERE string_id = ‘welcome_message’
• For some string fragment like about_us, contact_us etc, it has global scope; then leave page_id as blank
• To avoid multiple calling of functions to get translation, write a common function to get all translation for a particular page_id as array, and use this array all through the page. Thus you can avoid mysql query multiple times.
  eg: function get_all($page_id) returns array, say $Translate of all strings replacement. $Translate['login_message'], $Translate['login_error']
• Additional things to remember:
• Use this meta tab in html header
  <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text /html; charset=UTF-8” />
  to show all languages
• Create my_sql table in UTF-8 format
• Execute the following query before executing any retrieval queries. Otherwise you may get ????? for language like Arabic, Hindi, Chinese etc.
  mysql_query(“SET CHARACTER SET ‘utf8′”, $link);

I hope these information may help you when you develop a multi-langauge support website

Thank you
Sajith