Trip List for Facebook

A few years ago when I was organising trips for the University mountaineering club and wanted a better way to collect peoples names for climbing weekends I decided to build the trip list application for Facebook. It took 2 days but I came up with a very usable application for setting up a trip and allowing people to sign up. After I finished my stint as social secretary for the club I forgot about the application and just left it to fend for itself.

I have recently decided to pursue a career as a freelance web developer so I decided to go back to the application to refresh my Facebook programming skills; I have spent a few hours over the past week improving the application and fixing a few issues that arose as a result of changes to the Facebook platform over the years. I have now finished and have an application that works well again.

It's been fun working on Facebook again, it really is an easy platform to develop for. There are a number of quirks to get used to and things you can't do and Facebook's recent changes regarding messaging are an interesting change. They now don't want applications contacting users through the site itself, they either need to email the user directly or they can place a number (think unread count) next to the application name in the sidebar. Both of these methods don't seem ideal but I can see why they are making this change, in their eyes these changes are further separating the application and its identity from Facebook preventing annoying spammy apps from affecting the brand.