Peter's Blog

Today I’ve read about new bot, HoneyBot. It’s bot designed to use on IRC and Facebook chat. The way how it operates is both simple and clever. It enters the chat and starts chatting with two people (preferably with different sexes, it uses nickname analysis to distinguish it), then it passes text from one human to another, so there is no way that they would notice a bot, because they’re indeed talking with human being. Now bot is waiting for the link to be sent by one of parts and then changes it to its own directing to malicious page. Smart. So listen to your mother and don’t talk with strangers:)

Some time ago I’ve wanted to post excerpt from the book I was reading on Safari Books Online on my Facebook wall. Everyone who have ever used Safari knew that their books are displayed in special way, so you can only use their applet to copy text (probably they’ve done that to avoid people copying entire books). As a result you’ll obtain text which would reside in your clipboard. To publish it on Facebook you need just to paste it into appropriate field and…

Yes, Facebook limits text to be posted to 420 characters, so if you want to post something longer you need to find other way. And that’s how Facebook Text Hoster was born. It’s web application written by me to host text which can then be posted to Facebook. When you’ll go to fb.liox.eu you’ll find a field to enter your text and Send button, I believe it’s self explanatory. When you’ll click Send simple check is done to calculate length of your string, so if it’s less than 420 characters then it would not be hosted as there is no reason for it. Then you’ll see a page with your text, full link to your text, bit.ly shortened link and Facebook share button. After clicking Share you’ll be navigated to page as the one below.

It’s typical representation of Facebook generated link, as you can see there is shortened version of the text and bit.ly link, you can also add short description to it. Now click share again and voila your text is on your Facebook wall (of course you should be logged before sharing or you’ll be asked to log in), when somebody would click on it he would be navigated to hoster page and able to read full text.

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!

From the article on TechCrunch I’ve learned about new book “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World” by David Kirckpatrick. They’ve posted two excerpts there and in one of them you can read:
“In the first week of his sophomore year at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg cobbled together an internet software program he called Course Match. The idea was to help students pick classes based on who else was taking them. If a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well. Hundreds of students immediately started using it.”

Yeah, it’s always good to make choices in such field like education basing on such critical factor as other attendants. I know that perspective of sitting in the lecture hall next to hot chick is tempting, but common. I wonder if such people are really concerned about education and I believe answer is clear. But actually I was witness of same choices. When I was studying at university I was working in Dean’s Office and one of my responsibilities was assignment students to groups. I’ve often spoken with young people (mainly girls, guys seemed to care less about such things) whose main concern was to be in same group just because they were sitting on the same bench in high school. It even was going so far that some of them were changing their course of study (for instance from Management to Administration), just to be in same group. It was always making me laugh and now I can see that it wasn’t only my Alma Mater, and even not only Poland, but it’s happening everywhere. World is about to end I’m telling you.

Anyway, I’ve read these excerpts and I’ve enjoyed them so much that I’ve pre-ordered this book:) It’s coming on June 15th, so there is a little wait, but looks like it’s totally worth it.

Today is the great moment in history of this blog. I’ve added Facebook‘s Like button (). Yes ladies and gentlemen from now on you can easily show which of my posts you like:P

I must add that this button is here thanks to article of Mr. Ruhani Rabin.

I’ve been invited to test threadsy.com which is some kind of aggregation site which combines your mail, Facebook and Twitter (and more) accounts into one data stream. After some troubles with creating my account (it’s still in testing phase, so it can happen) I’ve added my Gmail, Twitter and Facebook accounts into it and begin to play. It’s pretty impressive. Everything is divided into two streams. One on the left called “inbound” consist every message which is posted directly to you. Left stream, called “unbound” is everything posted by your friends which is not addressed directly to you. You can post comments to Facebook posts directly from the stream, you can “like” them as well. You can post your post from it either and it’s possible to post both to FB and twitter simultaneously. It saves some time. But two things are pretty awesome:

1. When you’re posting link on FB, Threadsy will shorten it for you.

2. When your link points to a movie (for instance on YouTube) then threadsy would embed it into post. I know that FB is doing it as well, but it’s not always working, at least for me. Threadsy is handling it pretty well.

What I don’t like about it is that when I’ve first launched bottom of the screen was truncated so I was unable to see everything, that’s why I’ve missed option to invite ten more people to test Threadsy. And support suggested me to follow them on Twitter, because they’re posting invites there from time to time. Lame!
Anyway, I’m happy with this new service for now. Time will show if it’s really so good.

TechCrunch posted text about how Facebook is trying to help unpopular people by asking their friends to post more often on their walls, read more here. It reminded me that when I was 10 years old (more or less) I’ve had neighbors with exactly the same kid as described in article. He was a year younger than me and really nice guy, but not very popular. Even kids in the same age as he was preferred to play with me than with him. His mother was so desperate that she once come to me and my pal when we were playing, and dragged him by force to her apartment to play with her son. Yeah, I was shocked. My mate “escaped” after few minutes. Next day father of my neighbor approached me with very serious look in his eyes and told me that I’m stealing his son’s friends and that he doesn’t like it. I was really frightened (10 years old), but fortunately my other buddy was there with me, so it ended just with that. Anyway, as you probably suspecting, it doesn’t end up well to the kido. He became even more unpopular. So as TechCrunch already suggested, if you’re parent of not very “cool” kid, don’t try to make “artificial” friendships for him, it would end up even worst.

OK, don’t know why, but I’ve felt like I must write it down. Uff, relief.