So I’ve decided to make a trip to his hometown and to see what survived from his empire after WWII and Soviet’s occupation. There is still this big shoe store with walls made of glass, quite impressive. And there is Bata’s museum. There is one story in the book about Bata which I don’t like very much. Bata had big factory and was producing shoes on mass scale, so many shoemakers gone bankrupt as they couldn’t compete with Bata’s prices. One of such people when lost all his money committed suicide along with his wife and child. But before he did it he sent his workshop to Mr. Bata with a letter that he has ruined him. Tomas Bata wasn’t very touched apparently and ordered to place this workshop in the museum with description “that’s how shoes were made before me”. I think I’ve found it in the museum and you can see it below.

There is another story about Bata which I’ve learned when I was studying Management at University. He sent two employees to Africa to find out if there is market for shoes. After some time two telegrams came. First said “Nobody here wears shoes, absolutely no market”, second was “Nobody here wears shoes, big opportunity. Send shoes asap!”. It was real pleasure to see the place where he operated.

• Partition Manager Free Edition
• Backup & Recovery Free Edition
• Rescue Kit Express (also for Mac – Rescue Kit for Mac® OS X)

If they would give away their NTFS for Mac® OS X 8.0 for free as well, I would be in ecstasy, but still it’s a bunch of great programs. I’m using Partition Manager and it’s pretty good. Now would gonna give a try to Backup & Recovery. If you like these tools you can consider becoming a fan of Paragon on Facebook.

I don’t have anything to do with these company and have no benefits for promoting them, just wanted to share info about possibility of having useful tools for free.

Now let me say a little about project itself. It’s written in PHP and all data is kept in MySQL DB. It was great opportunity to learn new things, so I’m happy that I’ve done it, but I know that there are probably better ways to do the same. My wife says it’s waste of time as you can simply make a screenshot, publish it somewhere and post a link to it on FB, I love to receive support from my spouse. But no chance of learning something new is ever waste of time and if you’ll post image you would block ability to copy your text to your readers (which is not always so bad). Anyway in current shape it’s exactly what I’ve wanted it to be. Light, simple to use and creates descriptive Facebook posts. This took me some time as when I’ve written the app posts generated by it contained text from the app itself, not shortened version of hosted text. But I’ve studied FB documentation and found out that you need to specify two meta tags:
<meta name="title" content="title" /> <meta name="description" content="description " />
And fill them with information you want to be part of FB link. So I’ve created simple formula to do that. I could probably go without using bit.ly to shorten links, but I find them looking better than the long ones and it should be useful when sharing text outside FB, for instance via IM.

At the end I would like to say that this project has been created just for learning purposes and to help people who would want to post long text to Facebook. That’s why I’m not taking responsibility for texts hosted in my apps (as I’m not able to control that) and reserve the right to close it down and swipe DB if it would be abused. If you have any proposition of improvement, want to report abuse or bug, or just want to say something about this app please do so by commenting this post.

UPDATE1: I’m escaping special characters to prevent SQL injection, so instead of ‘ you’ll see \’. I hope I would figure out something better soon. Haha! I’ve solved it! I couldn’t go to sleep knowing that my “baby” is not acting as it should:) Now you can enjoy your text being displayed in exact way you’ve provided it.

UPDATE2: Must figure out how to maintain correct alignment of text, so it would display exactly how you’ve formatted it, not in one line as it’s now. But that needs to wait, I’m tired, goodnight. Done. Now you can enjoy beauty of line breaks thanks to nl2br command. I’ve also added auto select function to link fields. Enjoy!