Been a bit useless over the last month and haven't posted anything so thought it was about time I updated on what I have been doing recently. Since I started work again after a good Christmas break I have been working on a wide variety of projects. In particular, and the projects I will discuss in this post, I have built the Renegade website using Modx, used Facebook open graph to add Like buttons to the @bristol website and the Pixillion Sessions flash website which I have recently started on.
Renegade Media is a media and PR company which we have, since November, been designing a new website for. Over a periiod of about a week and a half I built the site using Modx from the designs given to me. This Modx build gave me a few new challenges to overcome regarding Modx which included jquery carousels and post tagging. For the main carousel I used the Nivo slider, an open source jquery carousel and adapted it to our design successfully. The post tagging required a bit more investigation and research as, although Modx does have the inbuilt capabilities to provide post tagging, there are quite a few steps required to achieve a successful result. This included the use of the ManagerManager plugin to activate the tagging system as well as using new template variable functions. Along with this I needed to develop a way for the tagging to link to archive pages specific for that tag. This required researching how I could add querystrings to the url and pick them up using PHP snippets to adjust the contents of the archived page. In successfully achieving this I have learnt further skills in using Modx which I can use in the future.
The second project with Facebook Open Graph was an interesting days worth of research and development into Open Graph. Facebooks Open Graph API is used to link websites directly to facebook via social graph elements such as like buttons. This then allows administrators to send messages to followers of these likes without creating actual pages for them. The open graph likes are also added to a users pages rather than just their wall so that the like and link is persistent. At Bristol wanted to add like buttons using Open graph to link their site and separate posts to Facebook and their facebook page. Firstly I built a text html page to develop some open graph examples so as to be sure that I could get the API to work. The open graph format consists of open graph specific meta tags with information such as description, admin id, title, url etc which are set in the tags and then parsed into facebook when the like button is clicked. The like button can be added via generated html as an iframe or as a facebook graph object as part of the facebook developers pages. When using the admin id tag this was all that was required for the open graph to work. However with the large amount of pages on the @bristol site it meant that there would be a lot individual admin pages for the specified administrator and so the the best option to use was the appid. This required creating a facebook app to manage the like buttons so that the onlyway of accessing the admin was to click the admin link on each individual like button. The app itself however has no control over the like buttons. To use the appid in this way the open graph required the Javascript SDK for the Facebook Graph and the facebook graph stylelike button. In developing this I noticed a number of limitations and gaps in facebook's development of the social graph elements. Particularly the management system of open graph elements is quite poor. Having individual admins for each like with no easy way of globally controlling them instantly makes the open graph difficult to control for administrators. This means there is also no easy way of monitoring their statistics which makes the system not particularly useable and functionable for businesses. It is also annoying that you cannot connect open graph elements to already produced facebook pages. Being that @bristol also has a facebook page they wanted the site to connect to this via the like buttons. However the only way we could achieve this was to make a global like link that took the user to the page, which they then could like. This complicates the process and so is another issue. Finally there are issues with the documentation of facebook Open Graph and its accompianing parts. It took quite a bit of guess work and a days research to discover whether open graph even produced individual fully functioning facebook pages or not as this would have been a problem. It turned out that actually only admin pages are created and standard users are only able to be redirected to the site, they cannot see the page at all. This was an issue with the selection of words used throughout the documentation I found and so this is also something I would like to see improve for facebook in the future. Facebook is obviously a powerful tool being so globally accepted and used, and so it would be good to see it become more easily intergratable.
My final project I have been working on is the Pixillion Session site. This has taken me back to doing Flash work which I am quite enjoying. Hopefully I have also learnt from my previous experience as I am trying to take more time to think and plan my process of creation with this project. The flash site is another portfolio piece for pixillion focusing on a project they have done with Chris Lucas (Arun productions) looking at a set of 8 performers and artists. The site displays video and photos of each of the 8 artists with information about them and the Pixillion Sessions project.
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