You might have noticed already, if you administer community or professional pages or have developed Facebook applications, that contrary to your own personal wall you never get notified when someone post a status or write a comment on your pages?

This is a problem for most page administrators and there is a 32 pages long (and growing) thread with people complaining about this missing feature. This is a problem because without such a feature you have to periodically crawl your own pages to check if anyone posted anything (status or comment) and get the opportunity to eventually respond to it, or spam it. I guess that since they won’t get notified about this thread the Facebook people will never notice the problem…

One proposed solution to this issue is to “like” each and every status update you post on your pages wall, however, beside the fact that liking everything you post may look a bit awkward, this does not gets you notified when someone posts a new status.

I have some pages I need to watch, so missing this feature was really a problem to me. And when it itches, I scratch… Besides, I wanted to experiment with the new Facebook Graph API.

So I created this application, it’s called “Watch My Pages!” and provides users with receiving daily e-mail notifications when someone posts a status or writes a comment to their pages wall. If you like it, have a problem with it or think about a feature, just drop a message on it’s wall, I’ll get notified ;)

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Since my LibraryThing application for Facebook is out it has clearly had a viral growth curve. So far there are only 435 users and every week I am looking for an inflection of this tendency. I know there will be one because there is a limited number of LibraryThing users on Facebook. My goal, right now, is to attract as many of them as possible on this application.

The next step will be to attract Facebook users to LibraryThing. But I know that for this I will need help from Tim Spalding and the LibraryThing team. I have always been grateful for their work but I must admit that I have been quite disappointed recently as I was trying to contact them and they constantly ignored me.

I am also thinking about open-sourcing the application, because I think it is both a good use case for people who are developing Python/Django applications on Google AppEngine and those who are developing for the Facebook platform. I still have to choose a license but the GNU Affero General Public License seems like a good match.

Anyway, if you love books, got plenty of them and want to share your readings, do not forget to give LibraryThing a try and once your are convinced, join the Facebook application, with this application you can:

• Add a tab and a box to your profile, listing your most recent books
• Choose the number of books to display in your profile tab
• Choose whether you want to display them with covers only or as a list which will include your ratings and reviews
• If you grant the application the right to publish to your stream it will publish books you add to LibraryThing on your wall
• It will also publish reviews as you write them on LibraryThing

You can also:

• Browse your Facebook friend’s books
• Find books on the search page
• Share a book you like or comment on it (those are Facebook only features and will not appear in LibraryThing)
• Add a book to your LibraryThing collection with a single click

Enjoy :)

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Today, the Fontself team has grown and is celebrating their first release of a product. Together with Netlog, the european online social portal, they are now giving the opportunity to the Netlog community members to send messages, post blog entries or post comments using personalized character fonts.

Congratulation to them, they have been working long and hard for their ideas to come out and I am proud I helped them make their dream come true.

[fontself font="_9905c72628cf93321a6ce43c146071af09cb7d2339b3b1cfc8eb764ccf6d87ff" size="30"]And this also gives me some advantages, like being able to use a Fontself font on my own blog and give you a glimpse at what the future of web fonts might be![/fontself]
[fontself font="_b72139c4df1037c8971033917d5bf684f05f9e33f8b990b9f3fef046823e596a" size="20"]Among other things, you will appreciate the ability to select, copy and paste the text :P[/fontself]
For now, the feature is only available to the french version of the platform but there is no doubt that it will rapidly extend to the rest of the 35 million Netlog members throughout Europe and that the Fontself team will continue to develop their technology and enhance the web.

If you want to stay informed about Fontself and their technology you can either subscribe to their newsletter, become a friend of their Netlog page, follow them on twitter or keep following this blog…

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There has been a lot of comments already about Sidewiki but the thing that instantly stroke me is the fact that there’s no easy way to keep up with what others are saying about your own pages. So I took a look at the Sidewiki API and built the Sidewiki RSS service.

This free service (hope you won’t mind the Google Ads) enables webmasters to get the URL to the recent Sidewiki entries for their pages. There’s even a bookmarklet that you can drop in your browser’s toolbar and use to get the feed of the page you are browsing.

Hope you will like it ;)

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However, I wanted a deeper integration between this blog and my Facebook profile. Here is what I have done.

In the process of installing the fbConnect plugin you have to create a Facebook application and, among other things, Facebook applications feature a canvas page and an application tab. The canvas page is the main application page, the tab can be added to any user’s or page’s profiles.

To setup the canvas page you specify an URL that will either serve FBML (Facebook markup) or pure HTML. In the latter case the page is displayed in an IFRAME.

Initially, I used the IFRAME version to display the home page but I found awkward to have my blog design mixed with the Facebook design. Additionally this technique cannot be used for tabs, that only support FBML.

Finally, I crafted special pages on this blog that serves only FBML with a special Facebook styling extracted from Foxinni’s Facebook WordPress Theme. The resulting canvas page can bee seen here and the corresponding profile tab is now featured on my own Facebook profile, here (you may not be able to see this one because of Facebook privacy control so I inserted a screenshot below).

If this is getting enough interest I might package it as a WordPress plugin. Leave a comment if you are interested or if you have additional ideas.

UPDATE (2010-03-13): This is now a WordPress plugin, see my plugins page.

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http://www.dita-op.org/

This milestone is a test release in order to see if there is interest in the DITA community for what the DITA Open Platform project plans to offer. It is also a mean to collect suggestions and ideas from the community.

The goal of this project is to provide the DITA community with a free and easy-to-deploy DITA oriented production platform. It is targeted at small companies or teams that do not need a complete CMS solution.

This the first open-source project I launch and I hope the DITA community members will find interest in the initiative.

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