Zero to One-Eighty » communities

Hyperventilating

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:05:19 +0000

Just the facts, ma’am

6,807 innocent people arrested in three months

Tottenham is in the London borough of Haringey:

From April 2011 – June 2011, 6,894 people were stopped by the police in Haringey. 6,807 were innocent. Black people were 26 times more likely to be stopped than white people nationally, but no more likely to be guilty of a crime.

Then on Friday, August 5, 2011 the police shot and killed Mark Duggan, and said that he fired a gun at them when he didn’t. Duggan was a father of three, who had hoped to marry his partner Semone Wilson and move out of Tottenham with his family.

Mark Duggan

Not long after some residents started burning vehicles and buildings, and other residents allege that the police allowed this to happen without intervening. People’s homes were destroyed.

Tottenham burns. Watch it →

Prime Minister David Cameron addressed the British Parliament on August 11 saying:

It is simply preposterous for anyone to suggest that people looting in Tottenham at the weekend, still less three days later Salford, were in any way doing so because of the death of Mark Duggan.

But facts need to be joined together

The following week, Paul Gilroy talked about how dealing with these problems involves understanding the “interconnecting parts:”

When I talk about the poverty of the imagination, I mean that we are thinking like people who approach these things through the lens of a privatized world. We only think of these things as individuals, and we don’t see them as connected. The last week has been an amazing class, a primer, to give us the opportunity to understand how these things function today.

Here’s more.

Static FBML no more

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:58:22 +0000

“Tabs” on the Wesleyan Facebook page

From the Facebook Developer blog last week:

Starting Friday, March 18^th, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible. Lastly, we want to be clear that our deprecation of FBML does not impact XFBML, such as the tags that support social plugins.

One’s instructions have been stale since Pages were updated in February with design changes and a new admin identity model. So it goes.

How to make a Facebook page

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:06:51 +0000

Working example

These tips are based on the creation of the Wesleyan University Facebook Page, and they update an earlier version to account for recent system changes.

Visit Wesleyan University on the Facebook

The basics

These are the basic steps:

Log in to Facebook.
Skim through “Creating, administering and editing your page.”
Visit “Create a Page,” and fill out the form to create a page.
Once you’ve created the Page (don’t publish it yet), an “Ads and Pages” button appears at screen bottom, next to Applications.
Click through to Ads and Pages → Pages.
Add anyone else you want to have admin access using Admins → Add in the right column (you can select from your Friends list or add by e-mail address).
Modify your other page settings to suit and then begin adding your content.
Some specific things you might want to configure:
- If you want to add an RSS feed to your Page’s Wall go to Edit Notes → Edit Import Settings → Import a Blog.
- To allow your Page’s fans to add their own photos and tag photos that you or others submit go to Edit Photos → Edit Settings → Allow Fans to Add Photos | Allow Tagging.
- If you want to create sidebar links to Favorite Pages then visit the pages you’d like to link add and select Add to My Pages Favorites.
- You will then need to go to your Boxes tab and drag Favorite Pages so that it displays in sidebar.
You can get further help at the rather weird Facebook Pages page.

Custom wall tabs

You can create a custom tab for your page that contains arbitrary HTML using the Static FBML Facebook application. See the “Wes on FB” tab for a live example of a custom tab made using Static FBML. Styling is achieved using inline CSS. The content should be restricted to a width to 500px. You can see the example HTML and CSS used for the Wesleyan page, modify it, and try your own.

To install Static FBML visit the application’s page in the Apps directory. You can add it to your page by selecting Add to my Page → Add to Page (next to the Page you want to add it to in the box that pops up). The application should now appear when you click on “Edit Page.” Your Static FBML app appears as one instance by default, below your default apps in the Edit admin area. (One instance is equivalent to one Wall tab.) The option to add another instance is inside the edit area of the first one. Go to Edit FBML → Add another FBML box.

To present the Static FBML instance as a tab, go to “Edit Page,” scroll to the instance, click “Application settings” and then “add” next to “Tab: Available.”

Navigating the edit options

One of the more confusing things about Facebook Pages is that not all of the options to edit something are available in the Edit area (i.e. when you click on “Edit Page” under your Page’s profile pic). I’ve found that sometimes the best way to get to what you’re looking for is to scroll to the bottom of the page you’re on and click the “Help” link in the footer, and then perform a search there for the app or edit option that you need.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are often several ways to accomplish something, often because there are multiple apps that function in a certain way or accomplish a given task. But within the interface there are also multiple pathways to the same Edit options even if the place where you edit something doesn’t always look the same. I find this confusing, but others may simply find it convenient.

Regarding “boxes”

(Update: In August, 2010 Facebook announced that profile boxes are going away. One effect of this is that adding custom sidebar content via applications like Static FBML is no longer possible. Whether the boxes tab itself will be completely removed is unclear.)

Since everything on Facebook looks like a box it might take a while to figure out what the Facebook UI is referring to when something is labeled Boxes with a capital “B.” It’s a box that appears inside the Boxes tab, which (if you have added content to it) appears by default after Wall, Info and Photos at the top of the main content area of the page. For Static FBML instances that you have created you may have the option to add the content as a Box or a Tab (Application settings → add Box | add Tab). I have seen differences depending on the application and have not investigated thoroughly. Nevertheless, if you can add it as a box it will appear somewhere in the content area on your Boxes tab. If you add it as a tab it will appear as its own tab.

Changes, etc.

As before, I’ll edit this page for accuracy and/or to add new tips as I discover them. If you have information to add then please contact me and I’ll update the page.

Joe Clark on comments

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:31:34 +0000

Joe Clark remarks on some fundamentals for making comments work:

Don’t enable comments unless you really have to. Even if you do, some postings don’t need comments.

You need published guidelines and a separate place to discuss the application of same.

You must have courage in your convictions and must have enough backbone to delete comments and ban users when necessary.

If you are too much of a pussy to throw your weight around now and then because somebody might call you a tyrant or a censor, hang up your skates right now and save everybody some trouble.

It’s slightly more desirable to delete first and ask questions later than the converse.

He also points to Metafilter as the paradigm case for how to do it right, and I agree. The fact that the admins delete uncivil posts keeps it a reasonable place to spend your time.

How the hell to make a Facebook page

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:09:40 +0000

If you haven’t tried to make one this post might seem a little odd. If you have then you probably know what I’m talking about.

The problem

Say you want to make a Facebook page, and you’re a Facebook regular. You look at your own profile page—you know how it works, after all, from back-to-front—and you think, “I’ll just follow the links and prompts and I’ll make myself a Facebook page.” Odds are it won’t be that easy. I don’t know why this is and I don’t care. You probably don’t either. So that’s why I’m going to tell you some things that took me way too long to find out—the kind of time that is now lost forever, never to be regained, and surely to be intensely regretted if Facebook is superceded by some other proprietary system entirely within the next 18 months.

The basics

These are the basic steps:

I started by reading over a few of the links at “How to create and manage Facebook Pages.”
Visit “Create a Page,” and fill out the form to create a page.
Once you’ve created the Page (don’t publish it yet), an “Ads and Pages” button appears at screen bottom, next to Applications.
Click through to Ads and Pages → Pages.
Add anyone else you want to have admin access using Admins → Add in the right column (you can select from your Friends list or add by e-mail address).
Modify your other page settings to suit and then begin adding your content.
Some specific things you might want to configure:
- If you want to add an RSS feed to your Page’s Wall go to Edit Notes → Edit Import Settings → Import a Blog.
- To allow your Page’s fans to add their own photos and tag photos that you or others submit go to Edit Photos → Edit Settings → Allow Fans to Add Photos | Allow Tagging.
- If you want to create sidebar links to Favorite Pages then visit the pages you’d like to link add and select Add to My Pages Favorites.
- You will then need to go to your Boxes tab and drag Favorite Pages so that it displays in sidebar.
You can get further help at the rather weird Facebook Pages / Public Profiles page.

So now your have your Facebook Page. If you’re happy with this and you feel done then have a great day, and I’ll catch you later. For everyone else, your troubles are just beginning.

The sidebar

So how do you change the sidebar? What if you’d like to add a little list of additional links. What if you’d like to add some free-form text? Chances are that the Page Edit options don’t offer you any clues. If you are like me then you probably had an page of someone else’s that you were using as model of what’s possible. You might—after an inordinate length of time (you’re like me, remember) realise that a Facebook Application must be how the cool kids are doing this.

I tend to think of Facebook Applications as third-party products that look bad and typically don’t fit in very well to their neuva-Windows 3.11-Facebook-blue-grey surroundings. My reference page’s sidebar just had a list of normal-looking links, and a nice little section header. It looked like any other section of the sidebar. I never guessed that it was being produced by an Application (instead of just being part of the Page Edit options), nor did I even dream that it was a Facebook Application that is not part of your page by default, and there’s no way in hell I knew it was called Static FBML. But there it is, folks. This is what you want. Every Facebook Page should have this as part of the Edit Page options—when I set up my page back in May, 2009, Static FBML a.k.a. Add Some Basic Shit to My Sidebar was a nowhere to be found.

Okay, so you want to get Static FBML. How? Alright, it’s not that hard, I’m exaggerating. You go to the Apps page, and type in a search for static fbml. For you, it will pop up right away as the only possible answer. For me, I got the interminable waiting graphic, then those annoying little red boxes reporting some error that goes way over the popup’s border—for ages and ages, even when I gave it a rest and came back later to try again… over several days. Anyhoo…

Choose that.

You can add it to your page by selecting Add to my Page → Add to Page (next to the Page you want to add it to in the box that pops up). The application should now appear when you click on “Edit Page.” You can configure it as you would any other default region of the page. Your Static FBML app appears as one instance by default, below your default apps in the Edit admin area. One instance is equivalent to one sidebar box. The option to add another instance is inside the edit area of the first one. Go to Edit FBML → Add another FBML box.

Navigating the edit options

One of the most confusing things about Facebook Pages to me is that not all of the options to edit something are available in the Edit area (i.e. when you click on “Edit Page” under your Page’s profile pic). I’ve found that sometimes the best way to get to what you’re looking for is to scroll to the bottom of the page you’re on and click the “Help” link in the footer, and then perform a search there for the app or edit option that you need.

Regarding ‘boxes’

Everything on Facebook looks like a box, so it might take you a while to figure out what the Facebook UI is referring to when something is labeled Boxes with a capital “B.” It’s the Boxes tab, which (at least on mine) appears after Wall, Info and Photos at the top of the main content area of the page. One thing you will want to know is how to move something (such as a Static FBML box) to your sidebar, or make it into an additional, custom tab. When you create a Static FBML box, for instance, it adds it as a box to the Boxes tab. To move it to your sidebar, go to Boxes and click on the pencil icon in the top right of that box’s title bar and select “Move to Wall tab.” To me, this does not make any sense. I think it should say “Move to sidebar.” But there you go. That’s how you get it there.

I think that whenever you create content for your page with a third-party/add-on app it generates it as a Box for you and puts it under the Boxes tab. You can then move it between tabs or to the Wall/sidebar. At least, that’s what I’ve observed so far.

More to come?

I’ll edit this page for accuracy and/or to add new tips as I discover them. If you’ve read this far and can add/correct or otherwise share what you know then by all means leave a comment and I’ll update the page. Hope this helps you other poor sods out there who have to waste brainspace on this. Hey, there are worse things, let’s be honest. I mean, at least it’s not MySpace… [shudder]

Ma.gnolia again?

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:40:08 +0000

According to Larry, Ma.gnolia is coming back:

Ma.gnolia is currently being remade as a by-invitation community bookmarking service.

As you might know, the public version of Ma.gnolia closed unexpectedly in early 2009. If you’d like to learn of what happened to Ma.gnolia the first, you can watch the Citizen Garden podcast or read about it in Todd Sieling’s and Chris Messina’s blog posts.

The new Ma.gnolia is slated to open late Summer of 2009. If you’d like to keep up with developments, you can follow Ma.gnolia on Twitter.

The redesign of drupal.org

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:02:40 +0000

@drupalredesign’s latest prototype update on Twitter

Mark Boulton and co are redesigning drupal.org using a “community design” process similar to the one that Automattic is using with WordPress these days. I was skeptical about this at first, though the interface redesign in WordPress 2.7 came out pretty well, more horse than camel. Both groups seem to be making this approach work.

For the Drupal redesign Boulton’s team is being really systematic about it: they released a new design prototype every Thursday through October and November so that people could comment over the weekend through various feedback channels (mainly Drupal Groups, but also Flickr and Twitter). Boulton comments that:

Through the flaming, disagreements, and arguments are clear, actionable points, which we take forward to the next round. At first, I thought design by community would be as bad as design by committee. Lots of people, all wanted their say, mixing black with white and ending with grey. Not so.

The results are clear and observable in the prototypes. It’s good to see how much the most recent iteration emphasises utility over exposition of the product. Earlier versions read more like an advertisement which encourages evaluation of the various claims (thinking), while later versions look more like something you can get down and use, which encourages interaction and exploration (doing).

Thirty-one