Fortunately, Rails makes it relatively easy. By default, Rails appends a file’s last-modified timestamp to the URL as a query parameter, which lets you perform cache-busting on old CSS files. Great stuff…except it only computes that timestamp once per mongrel session. This is a good thing for performance, but it’s a bad thing for facebook development.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way around it! I have my Facebook template, main.fbml.html, and at the top of it, I simply add:

<% ActionView::Base.computed_public_paths.clear if RAILS_ENV == "development" %>

Tada. Your file’s timestamp will be recomputed for each page load. This slows down page creation a bit, but it should speed up your development significantly, at least while you’re CSS hacking.

Kristen seemed to like the idea, which is encouraging - we’re pretty confident that once people start playing with it, they won’t be able to stop (you have no idea how much productivity we’ve lost because we just start blipping stuff and forget to stop), so it’s great to see a wider audience get their hands on it.

We’ve got some cool stuff around the corner, too, and can’t wait to start showing it off. Stay tuned!

We’ve cooked up a Ruby library to talk to the SocialGraph API, and get really interesting info out of it. This is the sort of thing that’s always more useful if more people have access to it, so even better, we’ve licensed it under the LGPL, so you can get all that Google goodness without having to do anything tedious to get it.

You can see the documentation if you’d like, or just enjoy the examples here:

require 'social_graph'
# We'll use Digg's Kevin Rose as our victim because hey, he's a pretty popular guy!

result = Google::SocialGraph.new "http://www.digg.com/users/kevinrose/"

# Get all people that Kevin refers to as a, acquaintance, contact, friend, or someone he's met
graph.refers_to_as([:acquaintance, :contact, :friend, :met]).inspect

# Now let’s get a list of all the people that say they’ve met Kevin
graph.referred_to_as(:met).inspect

# Anyone can say anything they want, but we want to know where else on the web we KNOW is Kevin.
# This looks for mutual links between sites to each other, with the given XFN identity.
graph.mutual_reference_as(:me).inspect

# We can also find people that Kevin is a friend with (and people who are friends with Kevin back!)
graph.mutual_reference_as([:friend, :met, :contact]).inspect

Get the source:

http://tagteaminteractive.com/code/social_graph/lib/social_graph.rb

Or, just get the gem!

gem install social_graph --source http://tagteaminteractive.com/code/

Hope it’s useful! If you end up using it, drop us a line and let us know how it’s being used.

It’s released under the LGPL.

Ever wanted to provide the same data in YAML and JSON formats? Find yourself cringing at the thought of rewriting the same view three times for three different formats? Never fear!

By overriding the render method and making use of the Hash.from_xml method, you can provide YAML and JSON equivalents to your XML views without any extra work.

Simply add this to application.rb:

def render(opts = {}, &block)
	if opts[:to_yaml] then
		headers["Content-Type"] = “text/plain;”
		render :text => Hash.from_xml(render_to_string(:template => opts[:to_yaml], :layout => false)).to_yaml, :layout => false
	elsif opts[:to_json] then
		# headers["Content-Type"] = “text/javascript;”
		render :json => Hash.from_xml(render_to_string(:template => opts[:to_json], :layout => false)).to_json, :layout => false
	else
		super opts, &block
	end
end

Now, you can call something like:

respond_to do |wants|
	wants.html
	wants.xml { render :layout => false }
	wants.yaml { render :to_yaml => "nodes/show.xml.builder" }
	wants.json { render :to_json => "nodes/show.xml.builder" }
end

And it Just Works™! Very useful if you’re wanting format flexibility without sacrificing a ton of time to get it.

We’re not quite open to the public yet, but we are taking signups for our closed beta phase now. If you’re interested, you can drop us a line at beta@blippr.com with your contact info, or just leave a comment on this entry. We’ll throw you into the big ‘ol beta pool, and toss an invite your way when we have ‘em to give out.

To put Facebook’s valuation in perspective, check out TechCrunch’s article: Facebook is Now 5th Most Valuable US Internet Company. Then head over to Silicon Alley Insider where you can get some perspective on why geeks everywhere are praising Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Not bad for a 23 year old.

I agree whole heartedly. Movie geek that I am, it’s difficult finding flicks that I haven’t heard of already and am interested in viewing. Netflix does a pretty good job, but it’s not nearly what it could be. I’m sure Amazon’s recommendation algorithms work well, but there’s no apparent value I would gain by partcipating, or if there is, they don’t elucidate it to their users. Or take music discovery for example. I never listen to the radio and I don’t have enough time to spend hours discovering new bands and songs that I like via iTunes. If I had to choose one place for music discovery, I would probably go with iLike, but even that is limited in the sense that it’s only for music, and doesn’t encompass all of my media interests. And as Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote just yesterday:

I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult.

So what’s the solution?

We believe the solution relies upon human relationships… the social graph, as so many are calling it now following the lead of Mark Zuckerberg. As we’ve reiterated, we believe there’s an inherent trust you associate with any comment coming from another person, especially someone you know personally. So, while the fact may be that Jeremy accurately writes “the cost of being wrong is higher” with discovery, discovery is still possible and just as imperative for the individuals he calls ”Time Poor” as is search. Consider this recent stat alone: according to DoubleClick in January 2007, 92% of males and 95% of females say that a friend’s recommendation is the most influential factor when buying a product or service. Or ask yourself, even: would you rather be informed by a number-crunching computer, or by your best friend?

Unlike an algorithm-based discovery model, however, there’s a huge barrier to a “social discovery” model being effective: to know what your friends like and recommend to you requires their participation. And let’s be honest in that most review sites make user-participation difficult. There’s far too much friction—lengthy sign up forms, email verification, difficult navigation, unclear actions, rating systems that make you think too much, and so on.

We’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately because we’re trying to overcome these typical barriers with our soon-to-beta blippr. While our application will have to stand the test of time, like any other, and somewhat break the mold of how it’s been done in the past, we’re striving to remove the unnecessary difficulty involved in user participation, increase the value of partcipation, and in general, make people’s media discovery process as transparent, frictionless, valuable, and entertaining as possible. We’ll save the surprises for when we launch, but we ourselves look forward to using the service. To discovering.

We don’t have endless energy.

We’re not Energizer bunnies that just keep going (and going) no matter what. We need fuel. Sometimes that comes in the form of Mountain Dew, sometimes Red Bull, and often, coffee that’s blacker than black. But lately, the fuel has been something else - a chocolate Frosty. I set my phone’s alarm for 12:30, right before the nearest Wendy’s with a drive-thru closes. And of course, we have to get fries, too, so we can dip the salty wonders into the chocolatey goodness. Mmmmmmm…

So there you have it. Now you know our secret power.