The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, May 02, 2015

Borg

Sigh.

I hate web based applications, because as soon as you get used to the interface—BAM some attention-deficit programmers change how everthing works, just because. Google Maps is a good example of this. It's still perhaps the best mapping application out there and I always use it, but every few months they change how the entire interface works, destroying existing patterns of use and wasting days, nay weeks of time as I attempt to learn how to use the features I use, only to find out half of them have been removed, because.

Ahhhhhhhhh!

But today I'm not here to bury Google Maps, but Facebook. They broke my posting application. The application I use when I post to this blog and send notification to Facebook that is posted on my … whatever that thing is called at Facebook. My wall? Timestream? Spam channel? Whatever it's called.

Facebook changed how things work on the backend, and now I'm getting the dreaded 803 error (and of course there are no real answers there).

Thank you Facebook.

Thank you a lot.

Amoeba

It appears that Facebook wants to be the internet (much like Google in fact) or at the very least, force the impression that the web is Facebook. Why else make such a drastic change in API that disallows small blogging sites from updating Facebook remotely?

After spending several hours pouring over the Facebook API documentation, my eyes are glazing over and from what I can see, it appears Facebook only supports three use cases (aisde from using the Facebook website itself):

  1. an application running on Android;
  2. an application running on iOS;
  3. an application running on a website (preferrably using Facebook to authenticate the user).

And that last one—it's someone actively using the website. My now-broken application? That was kicked off when I posted to my blog (most of the time that's via email, where I can use an editor of my choice to compose the entry instead of whatever hideous crap editing you get in a TEXTAREA on a webpage) where I may or may not be logged into Facebook at the time (usually not, not that it matters at all for tracking purposes, which is for another post).

And my application wasn't the only one Facebook broke. And that appliation looks like it won't be fixed any time soon ever! (sorry Dan)

So it looks like I'm stuck manually posting to Facebook when I update here. I was already updating GooglePlus manually because they have yet to provide an API to update remotely (I don't expect one any time soon). I suppose I could automatically update Twitter, which can update Facebook (now that I worked around the broken Twitter API—are you seeing a pattern here?) but there's no telling how long that will last; I'd be stuck with a 140 character limit including the link and well … no.

There's more to the web than just GoogleMyFacePlusSpaceBook, and long term, I think it'll be easier to just manually update FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace. XXXX the GoogleMyFaceSpaceBookTwitterPlus APIs. XXXX them all!

Update on Sunday, May 3rd, 2015 at 02:28 am

Petty, I know, but it made me feel better.

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