So we’ve jumped on the Facebook bandwagon a bit. You can now install the Interactive 8-Ball application to your Facebook profile.

Why would you want to install I8B on your Facebook profile?
I don’t know, but if you use Facebook as your homepage instead of iGoogle it’s nice to have I8B right there. We also update your profile and mini feed every time you ask a question through Facebook. Although this last bit can get tricky; we had a lady email us to take down a question she asked about a love prospect for fear of being had. (Which only gave us another idea for a Facebook app that we might share at some point.)

And What Happened?
I8B got a ton of traffic. In three days, we got 400 people to install the new application. Traffic to I8B trippled to 800 visits a day and then… leveled out. We actually lost 5-10 users today as people have started to uninstall the application. So growth is not exactly parabolic so far.

I guess we need something more to help the spread. (This blog post? A mention at TechCrunch? Maybe I’ll resubmit I8B to Emily Chang’s eHub.) It would be nice to have the 20,000 users that the other lame-o eight ball application on there has. Of course they got there first and so are high in the app directory and have the catchy URL at apps.facebook.com/eightball. (ours is apps.facebook.com/bettereightball)

What’s next?
A WineLog app for Facebook, duh. The I8B stuff was kind of a primer for work on a WineLog application. And good thing too. It is nice to work out all of the kinks using a brand that we aren’t as invested in. This article helped me a bunch, but it also took a lot of hacking around to figure out what he meant by everything. The toughest part was fixing Facebook’s broken PHP4 client. Don’t even try messing with that unofficial one. If anyone needs help, shoot me an email or IM.

Anyway, a WineLog app would be fun. Again, I would rather just go to WineLog to see what my friends are drinking. But if you spend your day at Facebook, it’s sweet to get notifications on what people are logging. And it will hopefully introduce WineLog to some new folks. Cross your fingers.

UPDATE: Here are links to my versions of the facebook api scripts. Download them and rename them to .php. I hope to comment up the code when I get a chance, so you can see what I changed. But in the meantime, this might be a better starting place for you than Facebook’s version.

facebook.php
facebookapi_php4_restlib.php
IsterXmlSimpleXMLImpl.php

Download all of the above files, rename them to .php, and follow the tutorial instructions here (or do whatever you’re doing). The strange one at the bottom is a library to handle XML objects (PHP5 does this natively I suppose). Read here for more on simplexml44. Or here is the entire simplexml gzip file as I unzipped and installed it on my server.

Way back, I wrote the tutorial on how to create a pagination scheme similar to the one that Digg uses. The code in the tutorial was meant to educate readers on how the algorithm works.

Meanwhile, I was using completely different code for my own projects. Typically I put all of the pagination code into a function (or PHP class), which makes it much easier to use in practice. Now I’ve made available a version of this function, which people should look to first if they want a quick implementation.

• Download the PHP code for the function here: diggstyle_function.txt.
• To use it make a function call like getPaginationString($page, $totalitems, $limit, $adjacents, $targetpage, $pagestring);.
• $page is the current page number
• $totalitems is the total number of items in the set. You usually get this from a SQL query.
• $adjacents is the number of page links to put adjacent to the current page.
• $targetpage is the URL you want to point to. e.g. index.php
• $pagetext is the string used to append the page variable to the URL. e.g. ?page= or &p=
• Use this style sheet.

Read the tutorial for more help and to see an example. For a real-live example, check out my Wine Log.

Also, Mis Algoritmos is at it again with a digg-style pagination plugin for Wordpress based on this code.

Earlier in the year, I wrote a tutorial on how to create pagination similar to Digg’s. The article focused on the basic algorithm for displaying the pagination, and there was definitely some opportunity for improvement in its implementation.

Well, the improvements are in. We have a modularized PHP version and a Perl version. See the updated pagination demo page for details.

Some people were interested in seeing the code I used to create the pagination for WineLog, which was based on the style of pagination used on sites like Digg and Flickr. I’ve put together a little demo which should help out anyone who is trying to create the same effect on their site.

(digg-style pagination demo)