Since I discovered the free Facebook App hosting by heroku I keep wanting to make something useful out of it. So I thought about a small service app. Without going into details yet about its nature there was one immediate problem to be solved. How to get hold of the data? So I thought to scrape it off some website. I know this isn’t very nice but unfortunately there is no feed I can use.. And how to best scrape a website?

Use Goutte!

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Console · Facebook App · Goutte · PHP · Silex · symfony components

More or less by accident I discovered that Facebook now teams up Heroku a San Francisco based hoster to provide easy hosting environments to Facebook App developers.

So I thought lets try it out and while I’m at it make it run Silex and Twig!

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Cloud Hosting · Deployment · Facebook App · Git · Heroku · Silex · Twig

Today I’ve got a little addition to yesterdays post in which I explained 5 steps to post a status message to Facebook without a logged in user. Following that post you are able to post on your Facebook Page wall as yourself.

But you might want to post as the Page itself.

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Facebook · PHP

Yesterday I spend quite some time only to figure out how to access the Facebook Graph API without depending on the current user being logged in. Basically I want to be able to i.e. post a status message from my Facebook app to the wall of one of my pages without user credentials.

It’s not rocket science.

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Facebook · PHP

Last week I had an interesting discussion over lunch with a colleague of mine. Though working for the same company our two devisions hardly share any process. His devision uses a particular software for storing and sharing documentation and some people of my devision might need access to those.

His idea: why not use this software for both devisions?

My answer: No way!!!

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Business · business value · Software

Blogging on test.ical.ly is fun and a really cool experience for over 1.5 years now. Usually I write my posts in advance like the day before and schedule them to be published some random time between 4 and 5 am in the morning.

Then on the next morning I get up and promote my new article on Twitter and Facebook and Google+ and Forrst. This takes up 20 minutes every morning of copying and pasting over and over again.

So I thought why not write a WordPress plugin that can do that for you?

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Facebook · forrst · Google Analytics · Google Plus · Google+ · Plugin · social media · Twiiter · Wordpress

Almost as long as I maintain this blog I have been using bit.ly as my URL shortener of choice. It is perfectly integrated into my daily workflow when I tweet, share, recommend and post about the latest blog article within social networks.

But I am coming to the conclusion that I no longer need bit.ly or any other shortener.

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Google Analytics · social media · tracking

When you decide to write Open Source Software there are about five levels of success you can reach. They all depend on the amount of effort you invest and the size of your target audience which in turn depends on the nature of thing you’re writing. Depending of what you try to achieve you can fail miserably or be really successful.

Though the more successful you are the less it has to do with you.

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FOSS · Open Source · OSS

You know these meetings, workshops, conference sessions where no one finishes within the given time? You’re fed up with being the bad guy who has to concentrate on the watch rather than on the informations to remind others of their time frames?

On the iPad there’s an app for that. Lightening Talk Timer.

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iPad · time keeping

In July I wrote a post congratulating all contributors to the first stable release of Symfony2. Since then one of the strongest entrance keywords that leads people to this blog is “happy birthday”.

I wonder what I could do with that..?

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affiliates · keywords · Online Marketing · SEO