Murten

Murten

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Home page: http://www.murtensaerbi.be

Posts by Murten

Increasing Facebook users

0
113 days
by in facebook, Uncategorized

Together with two of my former collegues I have started a new agency under the name Artcore Society. We offcourse have a page on Facebook, which people can “like”. When I have some freetime I am looking into things that could increase the fanbase.

Without being too braggy I know our work is more than decent enough to run with the big dogs: it’s just so that reaching everybody is a hard job. It’s also noteworthy that not everybody you know is a fan of your work. The trick is too find all the people that would like your work and let them like your page.

A few things that have helped our cause are these:

Put it on your own website/mailsignature/msn window
Kind of logical, but often overlooked. Your friends and readers will only find it logical that there are links to your own company website. It’s what you do. As long as you do not jam it in their throat they will not take offence.

Invite your subscribers
If you have an email base which you use to send newsletters, let them know about it with a small infoblock. Most likely the receivers have Facebook and are more than happy to like your page to get more news from you.

Create an attractive page
Make sure your page looks okay: nice logo in the profile picture area, fangate that explains what you do and what you can offer, relevant information, well-designed and easy to understand subpages, etc… you could even ask us to do it for you. ;)

Ask already-likers to join in on the quest for more likes
Why not organize an online “contest” that asks the users to tag your brand in their pictures? It generates buzz on their wall which might lead to more likes. If people see your brand on Facebook and like the product they will like your page aswell. You could do small contests, give-aways, … the fangate (ex.: like us and get the chance…) makes sure they like the page before they see the contest information.

Make a small print ad about the page in real life
A small sign in your office/store reminds the people that you have a Facebook page: if they remember this while they’re browsing Facebook they might add your page to their likes.


The growth will offcourse depend on what kind of company/product you try to like, but these small things could already help alot. If the people don’t know about it, they won’t be able to like it.

#quick snippet: Count the days between two dates

0
141 days
by in snippets

For a project at work I had to display how many days the visitor of the app had left to still join in on the fun. We had a fixed date (the launch of the project) and a variable date (the date of the day that the project visitor actually visited/used the app). So I was in the need of a script that counts the days between two dates. I know, not that hard, but good to have around nonetheless. Quick snippets for the win!

Anyway, the snippet is pretty clear:

- one variable that represents a day (milliseconds times seconds times minutes times hours)
- two dates turned to milliseconds by “getTime()”
- the difference between those milliseconds

The result of that gets divided by the day in milliseconds and voila: a between days counter!

private function getDaysBetweenDates(date1:Date,date2:Date):int {
	var durationDay:Number = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24
	var date1InMilli:Number = date1.getTime();
	var date2InMilli:Number = date2.getTime();		    
	var differenceInMilli:Number = Math.abs(date1InMilli - date2InMilli)		    
	return Math.round(differenceInMilli_ms/durationDay);
}

Facebook fangate: a how-to with PHP

1
143 days
by in facebook, snippets

The problem:
You have some awesome content on your facebook page, but you want visitors to like your page before they can read it, aka installing a fangate! No worries, PHP is our friend and this example can be set-up in under five minutes! You can do this with javascript too, but we over at Murten Saerbi choose the PHP way.


Woah… wait! What’s a fangate?
A fangate is actually just a page that checks whether a certain visitor is a fan of your page or not. Therefore this script will only work when you load it in a page. You can do this by creating a new app over on developers.facebook.com and adding the app to your page. The custom pages on Facebook are actually *just* HTML/PHP/… pages that Facebook loads into an iframe.

Like that it looks the content of your website is actually on Facebook inside a custom page tab.


The solution:
First you will need to download the php sdk file, you can do this over at GitHub. Next step is to actually create a php file that you can use as the fangate page. Open up the php tags and start with the base: requiring the file we just downloaded (don’t forget to upload!) and filling in the app id and the app secret. You can find these variables on your application setting screen on developers.facebook.com. Your file should look a bit like this:

<?php
 
require 'facebook.php';
 
$app_id = "your_app_id_here"; 
$app_secret = "your_app_secret_here";
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
        'appId' => $app_id,
        'secret' => $app_secret,
        'cookie' => true
));

After this all we really need is a parameter that tells us if a visitor likes the page he’s viewing or not. You can find this in the signed_request object, a Facebook object that holds various information about the page and the user. Get that object and read out the page_liked parameter:

<?php
$signed_request = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
 
$like_status = $signed_request["page"]["liked"];

When we have the like status inside a variable the rest is easy, a simple if statement will give us the ability to feed the visitor two content pages: one if the user doesn’t like our page yet and one if the user does like our page. That’s about it: easy peasy lemon squeezy! Just don’t forget to close the php code after the if and you’re all set:

if ($like_status) {
echo "<div style='margin-top:0px; position: absolute; top:0px;left:0px; width:520px; height:750px;'>
    <iframe src='HTTP://_THE_PAGE_THAT_NEEDS_TO_BE_SHOWN_WHEN_PEOPLE_LIKE' width='520' height='751' frameborder='0' scrolling='no'></iframe>
</div>";
} else {
echo "<div style='margin-top:0px; position: absolute; top:0px;left:0px; width:520px; height:750px;'>
  <iframe src='HTTP://_THE_PAGE_THAT_NEEDS_TO_BE_SHOWN_WHEN_PEOPLE_DONT_LIKE' width='520' height='751' frameborder='0' scrolling='no'></iframe>
</div>";
}
 
?>

Online you should now have atleast four files:

- the facebook.php file
- the fangate php file (index.php for instance)
- the file that people see when they’re not a fan yet
- the file that people see when they’re a fan

It’s that easy, really: so open up your favourite texteditor and start fan-gating away!

Fan page Facebook applications with authentication

0
143 days
by in facebook

The problem:
Applications that run on a page (“add application to page” on the app profile page) and require authentication (certain permissions being set) don’t open the permissions panel -OR- are redirecting to the app canvas page instead of the fan page tab where your application resides after you allow permissions. Let me make that as clear as I can by breaking this sentence down so nobody gets lost in translation:

1. You have an app that runs on a page and therefore only selected the “Page tab” option in the developers panel.
2. Your app needs authentication, meaning: your app requires certain permissions.
3. The Permission box does not appear when you ask for permissions -OR- the permissions box does not redirect you to the page tab.


The solution:
I spent the better part of the day looking for a solution for this, without result. There are some posts about this problem, but no decent answers. What seems to be wrong is when you only select the “page tab” option in the developer panel (developers.facebook.com > select your app) the app doesn’t redirect to the authentication page. When you add the “Website” option however, the app does go to the authentication page!

The only problem now is that the redirect url is the one that you filled in in the “website” option. This is an easy fix, in your integration of your permission screen just fill in whatever page you want to redirect too like this (javascript, since I implement the page with the facebook javascript SDK):

var APP_ID = "my_app_id_that_you_don't_get";
var REDIRECT_URI = "YOUR_PAGE_HERE";
var PERMS = "publish_stream"; //comma separated list, I only need publish

Now this will only work for one fan page, since we hardcode the fan page in the redirect uri. if others add the application to their page they will be redirected to your page instead of their own. Totally cool for you, but not so user-friendly. Offcourse, I have a solution for that too:

var APP_ID = "my_app_id_that_you_don't_get";
var REDIRECT_URI = document.location.href;
var PERMS = "publish_stream";

Much thanks goes out to my loyal testrabbit: Artcore Society‘s own Robby Carlier.

note: Accessing another domain from within an IFRAME is a security violation and will not be accepted by most browsers. You should disregard the last portion for now and insert the REDIRECT_URI hardcoded. I’ll look for a solution and post my findings.

Firing up the blog again, oldskool style!

0
143 days
by in news

After a small hiatus of sorts I am back in full force! Now working for the mighty Artcore Society – also known as my shiny, new company – I again find the urge to post samples, snippets and all sorts of internet randomness about flash/actionscript 3/facebook/mobile apps/etc… . Not because I like to spam the interweb, no no, because of two reasons:

- Giving back to the community and receiving eternal internet fame.
- Getting answers on questions that should be simple to solve but take me hours because some people simply neglect to document their code/api.

So, keep an eye open for Artcore news, snippets and examples. Oh, and like us on Facebook, too.

Cuz we’re totally kewl.

Murten Saerbi featured on FPO!

0
526 days
by in news

The lovely people of Under Consideration were so good to feature my cards on their FPO blog. Since some of the most interesting – and just plain nice – print work in the world gets featured on FPO I consider this as a huge honour. Thanks alot, FPO!

Check my link out over at the FPO blog.

Murten and Android 2.2: a love story.

0
549 days
by in news

It’s been a while:
It’s been a while indeed. I actually have alot of blogposts in draft but I didn’t really feel the need to complete them and if I don’t complete drafts nothing gets posted. Hence: the absence of posts. But why?

My focus is expanding:
Where I was used to developing flash content for the interweb I now feel the need to write stuff for mobile devices aswell. I bought a HTC desire (phone) a while ago and I love it (for as far you can love a phone, ofcourse). It is now running android 2.2 (Froyo) which supports flash 10, meaning: a decent flash version for mobile!

I automatically started to try out some of the flash sites I developed for the web (aah, curiosity!) on my phone and even when it’s ment to just work in a browser it works great on the phone aswell, which is offcourse nothing less than awesome!

Show me some stuff!
Yeah yeah, ofcourse you want to see some stuff. Well, something not developed by me but still cool nonetheless: remote droid. What is it, you say? Well, it’s a mouse and keyboard for your computer ON your phone! Exciting, no?

It’s actually really easy: you download the desktop computer app/laptop app here, unzip it and double-click the “RemoteDroidServer.jar” file (you need a java runtime environment for that, which you can download here). Assuming you have an internet connection the app opens and says something like the following screenshot:

remoteDroid



On your Android phone you just open up the marketplace and look for an app called “remoteDroid”. Installing it takes less than a minute and when you open it you just have to fill in the IP address the computer app says and you’re good to go!


Try it: it works like a charm!

Murten does greenpartners.be!

0
657 days
by in showroom

Greenpartners is a co-ooperative producers’ association of 73 vegetable growers and was in need for a new website so Murten Saerbi jumped up and made one for them! A really nice one, even if we say so ourselves. Don’t take our word for it: go check it out yourself over at greenpartners.be

#quick snippet: UNIX Timestamp to as3 Date

0
682 days
by in snippets

The problem:
Our flashmovie fetches a Timestamp (UNIX) from some kind of backend code and you need to change this to a workable Date format. It’s actually pretty easy and almost totally standard in flash!


Note:
Flash handles time in milliseconds (think about the timerclass that expects 3000 if you want to time 3 seconds) and the UNIX timestamp is a format based on seconds from the “first day” computers started to use the Gregorian Calendar. In short: the timestamp is defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970. Your computer keeps track of how many seconds have elapsed since then and the flash Date class expects this in milliseconds. Simply multiply your seconds with 1000 and you’re done. Easy peasy!


The solution:
A quick code snippet that’s even easy to read for – let’s say – mobile developers!

// replace the capitalized variable with your unix timestamp
// multiply it with 1000 (remember my note above!)
var currDate:Date = new Date(Number(YOUR_TIMESTAMP_HERE)*1000); 
 
// trace out the humanly readable values			
trace(currDate.getDate());
trace(currDate.getMonth());
trace(currDate.getFullYear());



Done!


A real life flash example (DateDisplayer):

Download this wonderful widget here!

Go now, my young actionscript children! Feed on my example and make me proud! Soon the world will be filled with actionscript 3.0 vampires!

Murten does Samsung StarTxT, cowboystyle!

1
729 days
by in showroom

After the highly successful absolut band website the sexiest agency of Belgium (or atleast the hottest cowboys of Antwerp) asked Murten Saerbi once again to work with them on a new project: Samsung’s bepaal het verhaal (dutch)!

The idea is simple: read the picture story on the website and fill in an sms on the Samsung StarTxT that could fit at the end. If your entry gets picked out at the end of each vote week you get yourself one of those awesome new Samsung phones! Oh, what would Charlotte send Thomas? You decide!

Check it out here (flashwork done by Murten Saerbi).

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