Last week, I announced that our weekly Hackfest would be working on a Facebook application. We decided to make it an open source application hosted on Google Code, which you can access here: http://code.google.com/p/fblotd. It is licensed under the new BSD License.

In week two of our weekly Hackfest, Glenn and I worked on the visual design for the profile box of our application. We agreed that it would be the area where we anticipate most of our users to interact with the application, so it needed to be focused on first.

The design intends to remain consistent with the look and feel of Facebook’s own applications, to reduce any confusion as to how our app. functions, as well as not disrupting the design of a user’s profile page. Here’s a screenshot of the first draft of the visual design:

I know I promised a write-up of the overall concept of the application in my previous blog entry, which I never got around to. However, I’m hoping that the visual design communicates the intent of the concept enough that people who see it will just “get it”–otherwise, it won’t be as effective of an application if it needs explanation before users can understand it.

In a nutshell, users are encouraged to complete the sentence that makes up the “List of the Day” as well as vote for submissions by others. The next day, we’ll display yesterday’s list and the top five submissions as voted by the users, followed by the current day’s new list.

We know that there are plenty of directions we could take this concept but for the initial release, we’re keeping the scope small so we can get it done quickly–especially since the Hackfest only meets once a week for two or three hours at a time.

Next week, I hope we can actually implement the code that implements the profile box. Then, we may open up the application so everyone can start adding it to their profile and help us test it!

If you’d like to participate in the development of this app., join the Hackfest and come hack with us! We meet every Monday at the Panera Bread in Paramus, NJ. Once you’ve joined, you can RSVP for the next meetup so we’ll know you’re coming.

If you have any questions about the app., feel free to ask them in the comments below.

Tags: Hackfest, New Jersey, Facebook, web design

Last week, Mike G. reminded us that we don’t do a lot of hacking at our weekly Hackfest, which is something I also wasn’t happy about. We did some brainstorming and decided to try writing a Facebook app.

So, last night, Glenn Martin and I sat down and started working on it. We started out trying to use Glenn’s hosting provider, but it choked on Facebook’s POST requests with a HTTP 405 error, not liking the HTTP verb. After a few minutes of fiddling around in the web-based control panel and having no luck, we decided to punt and use my Dreamhost setup.

After changing the Facebook app. settings, we were able to get our “hello world” FBML to render in Facebook. The Facebook API PHP5 code worked as expected and I was able to set the FBML in my Profile Box, as you can see in the screenshot below:

It’s nothing special yet, but it’s a start and is finally something we can actually start hacking on at the Hackfest.

Next week, I hope we can all get the basics of our app. functionality working. Between now and then, I’ll try to elaborate more on the concept behind the application so people will understand what it’s supposed to do.

Tags: Hackfest, New Jersey, Facebook, PHP

Tonight was the December Northern NJ MySQL Meetup, and Martin Adamec gave a presentation on the Content Management System, or CMS, that he’s implementing at work.

He’s using XML, XML Schema, XSLT and XForms to generate the UI for the CMS, as well as perform data validation to provide data quality controls. The work is done once when defining the XML Schema for a particular data entity, and the web forms are generated using XForms and XSLT. He’s doing this all using PHP’s XML support.

Thanks, Martin, for sharing your work and expertise with us.

Tags: MySQL, Meetup, Martin Adamec, XML, XSLT, XForms