Facebook App in a Week

A week ago I was at Barnes and Noble browsing for books. This usually means grabbing a few tech books and skimming them over with a coffee and a few magazines. One of the books I grabbed was on Facebook Connect — Facebooks not-so-new way of incorporating Facebook into your site. It actually solves a problem with an idea I’d had, so I decided to try implementing it on a real simple site. Below is a recap of the process from conception to deployment.

The Idea

I watch a lot of movies. At the end of each year, when movie nomination time rolls around, there’s one question I get a lot: “What was the best movie you saw last year?”. Seems easy enough, but not if you’ve seen 100 movies! I was thinking it’d be nice to have a place to keep track of which movies you saw, where you saw them, when you saw them and who you saw them with. This data would all be open and exportable (a major drawback of just about all movie rating/review sites I’ve seen).

Development

Development went off without much attention to detail, tests or css, and within a week, I had a very basic implementation of MovieFly out on production. It’s on Heroku, hosted entirely free.