King  Gary 

I’ve created a WordPress plugin which creates an iCal feed from your blog posts. It creates a calendar which can be added to pretty much any popular website (such as Google Calendar) or application (such as Microsoft Outlook).

I built this because I wanted to see when I made my WordPress posts, in a more graphical interface. I already used Google Calendar, so I would have loved to see my posts right in my calendar.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

It’s time I dispel some of the mystery surrounding the Facebook Applications that I have been spending my time building these past few months. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I have been spending time building Facebook Applications on the Platform. Well, it’s time I mentioned what I’ve been working on.

A large number of the applications that I’ve built from the ground up with a partner (who wishes to remain nameless) consists of one group, which are basically TV shows, and another group, which contain several sports.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

I’ve been working with the Facebook Platform for a few weeks now, and I have built a few dozen applications on it. It’s been a very interesting experience so far, not only because I have access to millions of users immediately, but also because of the unique development environment that is offered to me right from the start.

Developing for the Facebook platform is very different from other environments that I have worked with, including vBulletin when I was building forums, and WordPress when I was working at b5media, a blog network.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

I’m releasing a plugin which I’ll call the Post Stumbler WordPress plugin (originally to be called the “Stumble Upon” WordPress plugin, but it doesn’t use Stumble Upon at all – even though it tries to mimic its functionality) because that will help most people to understand what it does.

After building this, I found a post that was made over at TechCrunch which discusses about how it would be interesting if WordPress could have similar functionality to what Stumble Upon provides, so I hope that this fulfills that need.

What it does

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Do you have a lot of WordPress plugins and want an easier way of browsing them all? Would a Table of Contents for all of them help you browse through them faster? Then this WordPress plugin modification is for you!

First of all, here’s how it will look like in the end (I’ve hidden some plugins that I’d prefer not to appear in the screenshot):
CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

I’ve browsed through a few of my friends’ Facebook profiles recently, and I think they need a “Table of Contents” of sorts, or at least, make one appear when the profile is too long.

Why do I say this?

Because it gets annoying when scrolling through a Facebook profile that is several pages long (I’ve seen a lot that are easily more than 10 pages long if printed out).

Facebook is starting to look like a (more organized) MySpace every day – now if only there was a table of contents at the top of every profile that helped you quickly jump to certain sections of the profile, then it would help browsing considerably – AND it would show you what the person had on their profile, just in case you wanted to find out what their favorite music was, if you wanted to post on their wall, or if they were going to the same music concert that you are going to next week!

Here is an example of how it could look like:

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Well, since I’m out of b5media now, I’ve been busy with building Facebook Applications. Actually, a whole slew of them.

I won’t mention any specific Application names right now, but hopefully we’ll hit the half-million-users point soon in terms of the total number of users that we have across all of our Applications. A few of our applications are even in the top 100 most popular application list.

You may also have noticed that my Facebook profile has recently been having a major make-over. No, it’s not turning into a MySpace profile! I’ve just been testing out so many Facebook Applications that I end up just leaving them there

I’m also building a few Applications for other people as well; a few are in the education world, helping students with their notes, and others are more oriented towards the business-minded people.

Hopefully I’ll have fancy graphs and statistics to show in the near future

An anonymous letter from a Facebook Application developer was posted to Valleywag today, talking about how their hopes of the hyper-viral promises that Facebook brings were over-warranted.

This is unfortunate. I have had similar-but-not-as-bad issues with the Facebook platform and with Applications that I have on there, which I will post about hopefully sometime in the near future.

I think that it’s important to take advantage of the news feeds of your application’s users that are available to you because these are published to the friends of all of your users. This will have to be the next big goal for Facebook Application developers because Facebook has now add a limitation to only allow up to 10 invitations per application to be sent out by each user, per day.

This is very disappointing indeed.

I’ve made a new post over at Blog Herald entitled “Keeping categories simple to keep readers happy“. I talk about what’s a great way to organize your blog’s categories, and I also use the categories that I have here at King Gary as an example.

Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever I write a new blog post, I always think about which category suits the post best. I keep the number of categories that I have at a minimal level so that an appropriate category for every blog post is immediately obvious to me.

My rule of thumb for naming categories is, if you’ve got two categories that can overlap each other in an obvious manner, then you’ve got to change something there. Either merge the two categories, or remove one and expand the remaining one. I also tend to review my categories every few months, and if I have a category with less than 10 posts, then I ax it and merge the posts with that category into another category.

Go check it out!

I just visited Google Docs, and it looks like they had a make-over only a few hours ago. TechCrunch picked up on this and blogged about it.

It certainly was a surprise to see the changes at first. I used Google Docs back in the day, when it was still Writely (and I conversed with the team fairly regularly, giving suggestions, some which were implemented and still are.) So, I was used to the old view.

This new look incorporates folders, which are new, as well as tags, which existed before. Does this mean that tags aren’t working out as well as Google had hoped? TechCrunch poses the question to Gmail to see if they will also implement folders. I personally much prefer Google’s ‘labels’, as they call it, which are essentially just tags. I like these because they give me all the flexibility in the world, and I’m sure most of you who have worked with tags before know what I’m talking about.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »