blogbridge nearing a useful state

During the last days I have been toying around with the facebook API and FBML to create my own very first facebook application.

As always, I found out how to use the tools, but had no idea what to create with them. First I thought about some app/quiz/whatever for Siemens and their recruiting team, but after some research at the company I guess they have own plans (but - in my opinion - also no real idea how to use "Web 2.0" for attracting new employees or present Siemens in a modern or cool way [isn't it soooo yesterday, this "cool"?) and don't like to have strangers interfere.

Well, so I continued thinking, and sought inspiration from the facebook application directory. I don't find that directory too useful as I couldn't find a way to change the sorting of its entries, and a "display all apps in a simple table"-view might also be nice. Looking through the entries I found some blogging/RSS applications, most of them having bad ratings. Having gained some knowledge of facebook's inner workings I wondered what could be so complicated having at least a means of displaying one's blog posts e.g. in a tab of one's profile, so I started a blog (you're reading it right now :)) and began working on tG_blogbridge, which was intended to do exactly that: display the posts I write here at blogspot in my new "Blog"-tab at facebook.

During the last three-or-so days of programming I found out that one could add its blog directly to the profile Wall, but formatting seems to be lost and I didn't want my blog posts to be spewn in between other messages, so I stuck to my plan.

That's why my application has now reached usable state - theoretically it should be able to allow any user that has authorized the app to specify his blog URL and add a new tab to his profile with the blog's content (last 10 posts, if I recall correctly), given the blog author has set his feed's parameters correctly.

Things I want to implement in the future:

• post a new action one-liner to the owner's facebook wall when a new blog post was written
• make the number of displayed posts user-definable
• add a "create new post"-Button
• display at least a Link to the comments of a post (better yet: also show the comment contents below the associated post)

For the moment I'm set - bed's calling, and I seem to have gotten a cold sneezing and coughing all the time :(