Results tagged “Facebook”

As I mentioned, an English political blogger, one Anna Raccoon, had commissioned me to make a shiny new British version of my rusty old Autorantic Virtual Moonbat (AVM). The new robot is now built, and I am heartily sorry to introduce you to the Pet Labour Troll (PLT).

Just as with the AVM, the PLT comes in both a chat module, which lets you talk to the robot, and a smaller sidebar module, which does not.

And just as with the prior incarnation, the PLT lets anyone put either module on any website with just a line of code.

But the Pet Labour Troll also incorporates many improvements over the old AVM, using technology which was not available back in 2004. The PLT is coded in ActionScript 3 and PHP 5, making it twice as fast. And it has three things the AVM never had: its own domain, its own Facebook page, and its own Twitter feed.

The domain, labourtroll.com, has all the instructions for embedding the robot on your own website.

The Facebook page posts rants from the troll at random intervals, and the troll will reply to any posts written on its “wall.” After its first day of operation, the page has garnered 29 fans on Facebook. I expect this number to go higher.

And the Twitter page, at twitter.com/labourtroll, has its own feed of random ranting as well.

I’m sure you will join me in extending our British cousins our sincere sympathy, as they come to know the horror that is the Pet Labour Troll.

Over the past week, I have been learning how to write a Facebook application, so I could make our blogs post links on Facebook automatically every time we write a new entry. I noticed that there were services that did this already (such as Networked Blogs and Ping.fm), but none of the ones I found did exactly what I wanted, so I wrote my own. That’s just how I roll.

I had to read a lot of the Facebook Developers Documentation to get their API specs, especially the FBML language reference.

I’ve tested the code, and it works, but I haven’t actually gone live with the actual automatic posting yet. That will happen tomorrow.

UPDATE: Yep, totally works. Now I can do other stuff.