For Let’s Mix and a leading spirits brand I’ve developed a Facebook app to be displayed in a Facebook fan page tab.

A fun assignment, that turned out to be somewhat frustrating when I started to realize the limits of the Facebook API.

A Facebook app using FBML can include IFrames, and the app can also display the whole content in an IFrame if desired. The IFrame versions of the new and fancy social functionality can therefore easily be included, but put that same app in a tab on a fan page and this is no longer an option. All of a sudden the IFrames are gone.

Turns out that apps displayed in tabs can only use old style FBML. This is only the case for the specific combination of apps in tabs, but is still very frustrating when that’s exactly what you need to build. There are workarounds, through for example JavaScript, but to execute anything in JavaScript in this environment the user has to actively click something. No actions on load allowed. I hope that this is fixed by Facebook soon!

I haven’t had any reason to develop a full Facebook app yet, but since I was curious about their API I’ve been playing around with it. The SATS app was originally something I built years ago for my own webpage when I was a member of SATS (the gym). SATS’ search for classes didn’t have the interface I wanted, so I rearranged the search results a bit more to my liking. (It’s all ugly hacking, stripping data from an HTML result.) To my surprise, they haven’t changed their search functionality since then, so I ported the search to a Facebook app as an experiment. The app resides on my server and I rebuilt the whole front-end to return a JSON object with the data to show, then displaying it with FBML. I’d like to implement more of the existing search functionality, but as this has the status of being an ugly hack depending on SATS not rebuilding their search, I don’t think it’s worth the effort. Oh, and I think the app is buggy in IE at the moment.

After writing the SATS app I got curious about Google App Engine and wanted to do some sort of Hello World to test connecting GAE to a Facebook app. I built a very simple function just to display your friend list as an XML file.

The reason for this is that many of my friends complained about not being able to trace the people disappearing from their friend lists. This is also a convenient way to get the user ids for your friends if you’re developing an application and need test data. I’m not allowed to save versions of friend lists due to Facebook API user terms, but this way the users can save versions of their list to compare.

Stardoll is a community where little girls (and boys) can play with “paper” dolls. As a user you create a me-doll that resembles (or doesn’t resemble) you, then you dress and accessorize your doll. You also have a “suite” to fill with furniture and pets. You can design your own clothes, buy designer clothing for your doll and have parties in special party chat rooms that you furnish and decorate yourself.

Other than that, Stardoll of course has all the common functionality found in most communites. The community has an astounding nearly 50 million users all over the world!

In December 2009 I was at Stardoll coding front-end, which included HTML, CSS, JQuery, JSON, integrations with Flash and PHP.

I usually start out with a simple theme, then start modifying it, both the CSS parts and often quite a lot of PHP. The themes never work as expected or do exactly what I desire.

For this page, I’ve added widgets for posting to Facebook and Twitter as well as a SEO enhancing widget. I also added a cleanly styled tag cloud to the header to get both buzz words and search functionality there, and the PHP code widget to easier add custom blocks to the sidebars.

feminetik.se is a feminist community and discussion forum that flourished around 2004. It was founded by Josefine Alvunger and was originally a small ASP forum, when I stumbled upon it. I was a student, loving web programming but was starting to feel that school assignments just weren’t inspiring enough.

Josefine, back then a gender student, needed someone to do the programming of her visions and I wanted a playground. It was a perfect match. feminetik.se is built entirely by me, from scratch, in PHP and has played a large role in my learning programming.

feminetik.se has over 300 000 forum entries and has quite a lot of extra functionality to simplify the work of the moderators and hosts of the website, who can easily warn, mail or block users. The members have profile pages and guestbooks, and the site has image galleries and event calendars.

When I started to work full time and didn’t have time to develop feminetik.se anymore, Niklas Udd continued developing new functionality, such as feminetik’s themes and chat. Today I host the site on my server, but don’t do any programming.

KTH Automated Teaching Tool is an automatic judge, correcting programming assignment solutions sent in by students. The code is compiled and if there were no compilation errors the execution is timed and KATTIS checks that the code does what it should.

KATTIS had been around for a few years, known as Marvin, when the need for a web interface started to rise. Until then the solutions had been sent in by mail.

I built the web interface in PHP while I was a student at KTH. It handles programming assignments, students, teachers and courses. The student can view her own code directly in the browser, with syntax highlightning. The teachers connected to the course the student belongs to can also review the code.