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our score and many months ago, I attempted to help out in fixing a wordpress plugin that I wanted for my site.  In an effort to reach more people to share my stupidity and no real depth or knowledge, I wanted to utilize Facebook’s notes to pull my blog posts to Facebook and then pull any comments posted there back to my website.

After a few successful tries, I started to slowly realize that something was not quite right with Facebook.  The constant change of the site’s HTML made the plugin become a complete waste after a week of quality use after every fix.  I soon decided to take my last effort and release it back to the wordpress community for them to continue updating if desired.

Since releasing it back to others, I’ve always secretly wanted someone to find a solution.  Well, I’m now here to say I don’t want anyone to fix it.  Instead if people want to post to the facebook population, then just use the status messages and inform friends to exit from facebook for a great read.

Facebook, knowingly and purposefully make these consistent changes to the site’s design in order to deter any developers in coding solutions that will crawl the site for any data that Facebook does not allow one to receive via their APIs.  The reason for this has nothing to do with preventing your identity from being taken away from Facebook for security purposes.  They just want full control so that they can exploit the identity and sell the data for their profit as well as force users to stay within the Facebook walls in order to dictate what the web experience can and will be.

Therefore, until Facebook changes their current stance and opens the API to allow access to specific information externally for enhancing the social interaction outside of Facebook, my limited (and terrible developing) skills will not be used for pushing my traffic into Facebook, but to push Facebook traffic out.

Don’t get your hopes up WordPress users. I have not fixed the Facebook Comments plugin. I’ve received countless comments and emails regarding the plugin so I decided the best I could do for now is to aid the community by passing out more of the work I have performed in order to get this plugin working.

Currently, the plugin pulls back information from Facebook for the Notes comments, but the values stored in the WordPress database are not correct because of the regular expressions used and Facebook’s constant HTML updates.

However, I have added a feature so that you can see what the plugin does return in order to give a way of visually testing the plugin without harming your WordPress database. Hopefully someone else can take a look at the plugin, much like I did originally, and offer a solution. Keep the community updated on changes and fixes and perhaps we can get this plugin going again. If you find fixes, I’ll add them here or update with links to your own site.

Change Log;

• 0.38D – July 30, 2009 – Let’s term this version as D for Development. It’s far from working that it isn’t good enough for a Beta or Alpha label for now. Utilizing the “Test Import” function one can see what the plugin returns from Facebook.

Update for April 30, 2010: I have decided to end all development and future development related to this plugin. The reasoning for this change can be found here. I have closed the ability to post comments to this post and hope any further comments will be directed at my reasoning post.

One of the latest WordPress plugins I have found is one used for Facebook. Facebook Comments will pull comments left on Facebook within the Notes application and import them into one’s WordPress blog. I’ve started using the Notes application lately and found it quite annoying that I could not keep my comments synced up in a single location. Well thanks to this plugin I can.

Except that now it is broken. Facebook Comments relies heavily on regular expressions to find the comments within the HTML of the Facebook page. Whenever the HTML is updated (which seems to happen often lately), a change to the Facebook Comments plugin is needed. The guy that originally wrote the plugin seems to be quite busy and wasn’t able to get around to a fix so I took a quick stab at it. Not only did I fix it (I think), I also added an additional feature that allows one to give a default url for all Facebook comment posters.

I haven’t been able to reach the original creator yet to offer my solution so I’ll post it here until he responds. Please enjoy it and let me know if you find any additional errors in it. I must state that my regular expression skills are nonexistent and I had to do the best that I could with my limited knowledge.

Change Log:

• 0.36 – March 21 2009 – Due to the latest changes from Facebook, a few changes were needed for the plugin. I’m now posting my 0.36 version that I’ve tested locally. This will remove the extra link Facebook adds when a comment is too long. I did notice a new bug that deals with how Facebook changes links within comments, but that’s a fix for another day and time.
• 0.35 – March 13 2009 – Due to the latest changes from Facebook, a few changes were needed for the plugin. I’m now posting my 0.35 version that I’ve tested locally.
• 0.34 – March 01 2009

Update for April 30, 2010: I have decided to end all development and future development related to this plugin. The reasoning for this change can be found here. I have closed the ability to post comments to this post and hope any further comments will be directed at my reasoning post.

A few months ago, one of the guys at work (“Sugar” Ray) sent me an email about a new FireFox extension I might find useful. iMacro is quite simply a way to “automate firefox.” Have you ever found yourself wanting to automate certain activities you perform daily within your browser? Or are you unsure what you would need to automate? Here’s a quick sample of ways I have used iMacro to simplify my life.

• Testing for Web Applications – At work, I often have to build new capabilities into a web application. For these capabilities I need test users that sometimes can become a very repetitious task to create. Instead of taking 30 minutes or longer to create maybe 4 users, I use iMacro. I record my actions, save the macro and then set it to run for about 20 times. I then “set it and forget it.” I can walk away for lunch or attend a meeting while my users are being created.
• Entering a daily contest – Recently there was a contest for the chance to win a newly designed/decorated house. The contest allowed you to enter daily for more chances to win. I didn’t want to enter the form information every day so I made a quick macro to fill out the form for me. Instead of the 2 minutes to fill out the form, I was filling out the form daily within 10 seconds.
• Wachovia / Quicken – My biggest and favorite use of iMacro is with my bank accont. Wachovia earlier this year determined that it would charge users a monthly cost for using programs such as Microsoft Money or Quicken. Anytime these programs were used to pull account information the monthly charge would be instituted. For the record, I know Wachovia would enter you into the monthly charge even if you stopped using the program. To prevent the charge from appearing, one would need to stop using Money or Quicken as well as call and have yourself removed from the monthly charge. In order to keep the simplified way of using Quicken, I created a simple macro that would quickly login to my account and download the latest account information. By “manually” downloading the information, the charge would not apply. I was once again back on top of my finances and performing the same task I was before but now it was for free.

For advanced users, iMacro can utilize javascript for more programatic features but for simple every day use, it isn’t necessary. iMacro also comes with many sample macros to help you enhance your current macros or learn the capabilities of what iMacro can do for you. If anyone has any great macros they would like to share, please let me know. I’d love to hear them.