Recently facebook introduced 2 new features in homepage. If you look carefully on the left side you’ll see two new buttons:

Applications
Games

These are called dashboards. So what is the purpose of these 2 dashboards?

1. Using dashboards users can discover and engage with your applications on facebook
2. Users can know which applications are used by their friends
3. An application can easily publish a particular news for a particular user
4. An application can also publish global news, so that all users of that application be informed

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Sometimes you may need to check whether logged in user or a particular user is a fan of a facebook page or not. If you want to detect facebook fan in facebook page then checkout my previous article How To Detect Fan Of A Facebook Page

But if you want to detect facebook fan in a canvas application then there is a simple api to check that:

include_once "facebook.php";
$facebook = new Facebook($api, $secret);
//check whether logged in user is fan of http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thinkdiffnet/314110374728
$isFan      =   $facebook->api_client->pages_isFan(314110374728);

//check whether 123456789 user is fan of http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thinkdiffnet/314110374728
$isFan      =   $facebook->api_client->pages_isFan(314110374728, 123456789);

if ($isFan){
   echo "User is a fan of 'http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thinkdiffnet/314110374728' ";
}

Here the first parameter is page id and second parameter is uid. If no uid is provided then this api used the logged in user id. This api doesn’t work for application about pages.

Reference: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Pages.isFan

Now a days facebook web applications developing are highly demand-able. Many companies are creating facebook fan page for their website. Some of them need customize facebook applications to promote their services and products. So the demands for facebook application developer are increasing.

In my career I’ve been developing various type of facebook applications for more than 2 years. I’ve developed many fbml canvas base application, iframe base application, fb connect base application and facebook page base application. In this site you’ll see some of my open source facebook projects and some popular facebook related articles written by me.
Now I am going to highlight how to be a facebook ninja developer.

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This article is now deprecated because facebook changed their connect system. So have a look my updated post http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/graph-api-javascript-base-facebook-connect-tutorial/

There is nothing for me to write about facebook connect tutorial. Because if you visit Facebook_Connect_Tutorial1 You’ll see nicely written tutorial so that you could easily integrate facebook connect for your site. But in this article I will add little information for facebook connect.

I assume that you read the following link and already know implementation of facebook connect. I also assume you know how to setup a facebook canvas application. For learning canvas application setup you should follow this tutorial Creating_a_Platform_Application

Q1. User is connected your site by facebook connect. Now how could I detect user is logged in or not?

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Some of my friends have been developing facebook application for long time and one day we all are discussing what were our mistakes in past in developing facebook application. We also have been discussing some issues of facebook. Here I’ve pointed out some part of our discussion:

Never read terms and policy by facebook

Yeah this is happened for many developers. I also did same type of mistake once ago. I violated a rule and facebook shut down my app. After this when I work any new project, I first read the latest terms and policy. Read my previous article about it . Facebook is a platform and it has some serious rules that you’ve to abide during developing your application. Visit http://developers.facebook.com/policy/ and read terms before any new application development.

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For normal web page when a page becomes too long then we use same page hyperlink. That is if we are at the bottom of the page and want to move at the top then we click a link and that moves us at the top instantly. This is done in normal website by this way

<div id="atop">.....</div>
lots of information.....
...
...
<a href="#atop">Top Page</a>

<a name="ftop"></a>
lots of information.....
...
...
<a href="#ftop">Top Page</a>

Look at the code we used <a> tag and name attribute within the <a> tag. This is the only difference for facebook application. Checkout http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thinkdiffnet/314110374728?v=app_7146470109 and move at down and click Top Page. You’ll see that page is moving slowly to the top.

According to developer roadmap by facebook this type of widget is now deprecated and any time facebook will remove this feature from application. I don’t support this decision, because widgets are one of the nice features for facebook application. Look at the birthday widget, this updates periodically when any new friend’s birthday is coming soon. And thus user becomes informed about his friends birthday.

Like this there are many good applications those use this widget feature. I don’t know why facebook deprecated this widget, because user can add/remove this type of widget according to his own wish.

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Let me tell you a story about my experience regarding web hosting, cdn technology, domain registration company. In 2007 I first bought a shared hosting from a local (Bangladeshi) company named CronySoft.com. Their service and supports are good and cheap in Bangladesh.  Later I found that they provide their hosting from hostmonster.com

In 2008, first time I bought shared hosting account and domain from GoDaddy.com using my debit card. I’ve still one of my site is hosted there as I bought for 3 years hosting.  I don’t like their control panel to mange my host. It looks slow for me.  And regarding their server, if you host facebook application that has low traffic sometimes you’ll see timeout. So think what happen if you have moderate level traffic application. I think their server is sharing many accounts and thus response time is slow most of the time. I don’t recommend Godaddy for any purpose.

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What would be your feelings if you see your site is down for more than 4 hours, or your VPS is shutting down by the hosting company and needs to reboot? In my case I would be feeling very angry if I see such type of long downtime. But if I be informed within 5 min or 15 min after downtime then I can take proper action to restore my service.

So if you want to get alert message when your site is down you could use third party service like site24x7, siteuptime , 100pulse

All of them has free services and paid services. Personally I use site24x7 . Here You could set 2 urls and http port check in 60 min interval as a free service. You can pay 1$/month for 1 Url to check between 1 min to 60 min. They will send email to you if your site is down. You can also purchase SMS package so that they can also send sms message as alert.

So checkout these sites and use which site suits best to you.

After getting some of my friends request today I developed this project and released as Open Source GPL License. This is a php, jquery base application.This applications uses the api of facebook, linkedin and twitter to update user’s status on those sites. So you’ll publish one status that will update on 3 sites instantly.

This application will be very helpful to learn fbconnect, facebook extended permission and api to update status, oAuth for twitter and linkedin authentication. And also to learn linkedin api, twitter api usage.

visit http://thinkdiff.net/demo/fblinkedtwit/index.php to see the demo.

On the right side of the demo, you’ll see FBConnect button, Give Twitter Access and Give Linkedin Access Button.

If you want to update status in facebook, after connecting the site using FBConnect you’ve to give special permission by clicking Status Update permission.  Otherwise facebook status will not update.

On the right side write something and click Update Status. If you already give access permission for facebook, linkedin and twitter your user status will update.

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