The Sustain-a-what?!?! application is a quiz intended to amuse while making the user think about the issues surrounding the hot topic of sustainability.

The quiz runs on the Drupal platform so the client can maintain its content for themselves. I wrote a custom module to manage the quiz questions and answers, as well as storing the results and displaying them for users taking the quiz.

“An excellent service from start to finish. There were delays in us being in a position to begin the project but Likemind stayed in touch regularly and were ready to go as soon as we were. The technical specification was immediately understood by them and suggestions were made to improve it with regards to how facebook actually works. Their understanding of the visual as well as the technical was particularly useful to us.

We were very impressed with the service, the level of competence and the end result. Would not hesitate to recommend.”
– Chris Hillier, twelfth man limited

Developed for twelfth man and their client synnwyr busnes.

The Daily Goss is an online celebrity gossip magazine. They asked me to create a Facebook application that would display the latest headlines from their RSS feed.

The application consists of a canvas page and profile entry that are essentially identical. The headlines are got from the RSS feed, while the thumbnail images are fetched directly from the news pages themselves. The data is fetched asynchronously by a cron task that runs at regular intervals. When there is new data it is parsed and stored. This means that no user ever has to wait for the data to be got from the Daily Goss site - it always comes direct from the application.

I’m working on a new Facebook application for a client and being a lazy programmer I wanted to do as little work as possible while producing a good result.

I’d started building the app with the Zend Framework but while it is many ways an excellent library it is as yet only a starting point. To build any sort of real-world application with the Zend Framework will require considerable effort, and I was beginning to think this job was going to be a headache.

Imagine my delight, then, at finding Dave Cohen had written a Facebook integration module for my favourite platform, Drupal. Could that solve my development problems? (more…)

This simple Facebook application was written for musician and journalist Rhodri Marsden to publicise his DIY music project “The Schema“.

It plays a tune! To be more specific, it plays The Schema’s single: Those Rules You Made, available to purchase from all good online outlets from August 20th 2007.

“When I needed to create a Facebook application in a hurry for a music project I was working on, Alfred came up with the goods quickly, completely to spec, and kept me informed throughout. Top hole.”
— Rhodri Marsden.

Imaginary Friends is a Facebook application I wrote to explore the possibilities of the API and to act as an advertisement and demonstration of my services.

It’s quite silly, frankly: it allows you to make friends with, and chat to, some software pretending to be a person under one of a large number of different unlikely pseudonyms.

Still, it’s given me some insight into the possibilities that Facebook offers as a platform. And when I’m bored, there’s always Squirehood Armhole or Flyblow Multinomial to talk to…

Everybody’s talking about Facebook, it seems. One of the most interesting aspects of it for me as a developer is the existence of its API, which makes it possible to create new networking applications, or to integrate existing applications with the Facebook platform.
(more…)