The Facebook Timeline and you.... [news]
So what's all the hype about the Facebook Timeline?
Click picture for the "Introducing Facebook Timeline" page.
Well, unless you've been living under a rock, or in the year 2010, you've probably heard by now that Facebook has some major changes coming down the line already for your profiles! The Timeline! What is is? It's actually quite a pleasant change in my opinion. A nice, fresh change to the old user profile.
Wait, what? You've heard horrible things about it? What's new? You hear horrible things every time Facebook changes something. It's because the majority of people are sheep and are resistant to change. Never fear though, this change is good, you will like it.
There is, however, a horrible rumor floating around that you've lost the fine-grain control over your posts as far as restricting posts from being seen from certain groups of people etc.
This is entirely untrue! When you click the drop-down arrow while viewing a post on your own timeline, it is true that the only options there are "Change Date, Add/Change Location, Hide From Timeline, Delete Post, Report/Mark as Spam". Here's where the rumor starts. People (the dumb ones) think "WHAT? I have to show it or hide it? That's it??"
*buzzer sounds* EHHHHHH! Wrong!
While those are the only options available to you while viewing that post on the timeline, if you actually view the post on your wall, you still have the fine-grain control of filtering by lists etc.
Sorry Google+, I know some of you were hoping to have a massive flood of users coming over. Doesn't look like this is 'the one' change from Facebook though that'll cause it. Keep holding your breath though, with the rate Facebook changes eventually they'll screw up something enough to piss people off.
Now, if only EVERYBODY had access to timeline instead of this slowly fazed in crap...
-MM
Upcoming changes to zenFBSuite [news]
So now that I've had some time to dust the old code fingers off and started looking at some more of the OpenGraph implementation and requirements that Facebook is using, I'll be doing some updates to the zenFBSuite. You'll notice some of the changes working already on this site, once I get everything coded properly for the plugin I'll do a new release.
I may wait until 1.4.2 of ZP is released though, we'll see how time allows me.
Under Construction [news]
So for any of you following, it's been a while since I've touched the gallery site. Well sadly there was an exploit that happened that caused a site hack.
After fixing it, I've decided to redesign my site.
Firstly, I'm now running the 1.4.2 beta (11-23 nightly trunk) at the moment. I'll keep it up to date until 1.4.2 releases and keep testing plugins against it.
Secondly, you'll notice that some things don't look or act like they used to, it's just a part of updating. Another reason I've decided to redesign. So be patient, shoot me a message if something isn't working, and relax while I knock the dust off the old code.
-MM
zenFBSuite - version 1.4.1-BETA [7271] [news]
I'm excited! Zenphoto 1.4.1 is just around the corner! So in the spirit of the project I decided to update the zenFBSuite and my other plugins to the most recent trunk build, which as you can see from the title is the 1.4.1-Beta.
While updating the site to the 1.4.1-beta and fixing a couple of things that needed to change in the zenFBSuite to match, I added a new feature to the zenFBSuite. A "Send" button. What this will allow you to do is similar to the Like button. It will share all the pretty info the Like button does, but instead of posting it to your wall, it allows you to send a facebook message to a person, people, or groups. Pretty keen eh? Check it out in action around the site or the demo/info page: here.
Aside from it being it's own plugin, I've also included it as an option in the Like button options so it can be included right alongside your Like button.
Updates, updates, updates! [news]
Ch...Ch...ch...Changes!
(sorry song was stuck in my head)
The Site
So it appears over the last few days I've had a chance to do some updates on my plug-ins. As well as plug-in updates, I updated the site to use the 4/18/2011 Trunk build. I try to keep up-to-date with the nightlies and almost always update the site and test the plug-ins before doing and "upgrade" notes.
Everything appears to be functioning as planned with the changes to the plug-ins and the site.
Please see general notes below as well as visit plug-in pages listed in menu for info/demo/download per usual.
zenFBSuite
A few changes to the suite. Archives will now be uploaded with two names. One for archive/version number, and one labeled current. This is merely a housekeeping item and will let me avoid having to update every download link on each page to the new archive/version numbers.
Development Note: Soon, I will have the plug-in disable itself if you do not provide your OWN application ID and/or admin ID. This is done for your sake, believe me. So follow the steps in the articles linked in the menu to the left please!
zenFBComments
Updated to utilize the "new" Facebook comments plug-in. I put new in quotes because it's been out for a while now, I just didn't want to make changes until they allowed for either CSS updates or a dark theme option. Eventually they did as well as a few other changes to the API.
Also, as the zenFBComments style is now handled via a light/dark theme option provided by facebook, the "plugins/zenFBComments" folder with the various CSS files are no longer needed.
Provided a link to the new Facebook moderation/comment tool that allows you to see a centralized listing of comments on your site, and if you've enabled moderation as default option, allow you to moderate comments.
zenFBcommon
A couple of quick changes here. Most notable would be the addition of the "Default Logo URL" option. If zenphoto is now on a gallery page showing an item with a thumbnail, it will populate og:image with the cached thumbnail. If it is not, it checks to see if anything is specified for the URL to default logo. If "default logo" is not null, it will then populate og:image tag with information pointing to default logo. If "default logo" is null/empty, it will not add og:image metatag.
The rest are minor housekeeping/commenting of code, which includes removal of some stray google verification code that may have slipped through on last release.
zenTwitter
Just a version update after verifying changes with the site's current trunk build.
Development Note: I'm looking into the Twitter API to see if there is a better way to handle this plug-in but for now with my current time constraints I'm leaving plug-in as is.
zenHttpbl
Just a version update after verifying changes with the site's current trunk build.
Development Note: I'm pondering a change to the zenHttpbl plug-in to display the stats of blocked users. Ideally I'd like to have a log of IPs blocked, as well as display the stats from the HTTP:BL dashboard but as far as I can tell there is no API interface to pull those stats. So, hopefully in the near future I'll have at least implemented a counter to show the # of blacklisted IPs blocked so you can proudly show that you are spam free and have a log of the IPs that you have denied access to.
google_analytics
As a note, this plug-in still works under current build (1.4.0.3-7031). As this was really just a minor update to another authors plug-in I'm not keeping current archives of this plug-in.
I think that about does it with the changes. I'll update if I remember anything else.
Onward & upward!
