First of all, violent / dangerous protesters are just that violent and dangerous. There are plenty of laws in place to deal with people who hurt others or destroy property. The people willing to do illegal / harmful acts are not going to care in the least about an extra fine. If someone is willing to chance prison and felony conviction a city ordinance isn't going to have any impact on their choices. However, it will work to stifle the voices of peaceful protesters.

To be clear, I believe adding any red tape to the 1st amendment, which these ordinances clearly do, is an example of abridging the freedom of speech and as such wholly unconstitutional. As if that wasn't bad enough in itself, it is also abundantly clear that these ordinances have little to do with the Nato / G8 summits, regardless of what the mayor would like you to believe. The people protesting Nato / G8 still have 4 months to plan, acquire permits, etc before Nato / G8. I don't think the protesters that are “the reason for these ordinances” will have much trouble working within them (despite the fact that they shouldn't have to). However, everyday people who may want to protest, for example, a school closing, cutting funding for hospitals, job cuts, unfair worker treatment, etc will have a much harder time complying with these new ordinances.

Introducing an ordinance that stifles dissent at a time when the city is cutting funding to schools, medical facilities, the library, etc seems all too convenient. It is obvious to me that this ordinance targets primarily honest law abiding citizens who want to exercise their RIGHT to show their disapproval. Probably worst of all is the fact that these ordinances target people financially. This is a huge concern since the people of our poorest neighborhoods are the same people who are losing their schools, hospitals, and jobs. They are the same people who have the most reason to protest. Do you honestly believe that it is a coincidence that they are the ones most stifled by this new ordinance?

Create a Facebook App

First you need to create a facebook app that you own / control. To do this go to this url: https://www.facebook.com/developers/ and click "Set Up New App". Enter a name for the app and agree to the terms. It doesn't matter what you name the app. Once that is done go to the Web Site tab on the left and enter the URL for your site in the Site URL box. This is required or you will get an invalid referral error when you try to generate your token.

Once you have your app created copy and paste the "Application ID" we will need this later.

Generating the token

Now we need to build the URL to create our access token. There are 3 important parts to this process.

client_id – This is your Application Id you copied earlier

redirect_uri – this should be the URL to your site

scope – this is what you want the access code to allow access to. If you don't specify "offline_access" the access code will expire when you log out of facebook.

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?type=user_agent&client_id=####&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fitslennysfault.com&scope=read_stream,offline_access

Now you just have to replace the "####" with your application id and "itslennysfault.com" with your website's url and paste it in to your browser's URL bar. You will then be taken to the typical facebook allow permissions page. Once you click "Allow" you will be redirected to your web site with some extra data.

The URL when you are redirected back should look like this:
http://itslennysfault.com/#access_token=######&expires_in=0

Where the ##### is is your access token… copy and paste that and you're good to go. You can use this access code to Get latest status from facebook fan pages in PHP.

$("a[href^='http://'],a[href^='https://']").click(function(){
    window.open($(this).attr('href'));
    return false;
});

The above code can be problematic if your site uses full urls. For example my site has full urls in the navigation (eg http://itslennysfault.com/about) so with the code above those links would open in a new window. To avoid this use the following code and update "goodDomain" to your site's url.

    $("a[href^='http://'],a[href^='https://']").click(function(){
    	var myHref=$(this).attr('href');
    	var goodDomain="http://itslennysfault.com";
    	if(myHref.toLowerCase().substr(0,goodDomain.length)==goodDomain)
    		return true;
    	window.open(myHref);
    	return false;
    });

Obviously, either code should be placed inside a wrapper and loaded after the DOM is ready.

Considerations

In testing this I realized that there are some facebook fan pages that for whatever reason DO NOT have an rss feed. I work on several sites that have facebook fan pages and unfortunately a few of them just return an empty string. I have no idea why or how to fix this so don't ask. If you figure it out please share. If you find yourself in this situation you have to use the Facebook Graph API. You can use this guide: Get latest status from facebook using Graph API

Overview

The process is fairly simple we just load the fan page rss feed using the facebook feeds url as follows: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=YOUR_FACEBOOK_ID&format=atom10

One thing I noticed is facebook doesn't allow basic curl calls to this URL. For some reason it won't return any data unless you set the user agent to pretend to be one of the major browsers. I assume this is a very lame attempt to keep websites and bots from pulling data from their feeds. So in my example I use a basic Firefox / windows user agent.

How do I get my page user id?

It's very simple just go to your facebook fan page and click your profile picture in the top left. Once you do you'll be taken to a URL that looks like this: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=pa.#########

after "pa." where the ##### is will be your user id.

You can also go to your photo albums and you'll get a url like this: https://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=####### … again where the ##### is where your facebook id will be.

The Nuts and Bolts

Here is a quick PHP example for pulling these feeds. If you're using this on a production site I HIGHLY advise pulling this in to a database using a cron job then loading the data to the site from the database. That way you're not hitting facebooks server every page load AND if (when) facebook changes things again you won't get errors on the public facing page.

//function to retrieve posts from facebook server
function loadFB($fbID){
	//facebook feed url
    $url="http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=".$fbID."&format=atom10";

    //load and setup CURL
    $c = curl_init();

    //set options and make it up to look like firefox
	$userAgent = "Firefox (WindowsXP) - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6";
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, false);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

    //get data from facebook and decode XML
    $page = curl_exec($c);
    $pxml= new SimpleXMLElement($page);

    //close the connection
    curl_close($c);

    //return the data as an object
    return $pxml->entry;
}

//BE SURE to enter your facebook id here
$fbid="FACEBOOK_ID_GOES_HERE";

//how may posts to show
$fbLimit=10;
//variable used to count how many weÕve loaded
$fbCount=0;

//call the function and get the posts from facebook
$myPosts=loadFB($fbid);

//set timezone (change this to your timezone)
date_default_timezone_set("America/Chicago");

//loop through all the posts we got from facebook
foreach($myPosts as $dPost){
      //get the post date / time and convert to unix time
      $dTime = strtotime($dPost->published);
      //format the date / time into something human readable
      //if you want it formatted differently look up the php date function
      $myTime=date("M d Y h:ia",$dTime);
      //output the date / time
      echo("<b>".$myTime."</b>");
      //output the message body
      echo($dPost->content);
      //add a line break to separate comments
      echo("<br /><br />");
      //increment counter
      $fbCount++;
      //if we've outputted the number set above in fblimit we're done
      if($fbCount >= $fbLimit) break;
}

This code is fairly well commented and should serve as a good start to be able to easily pull in your facebook news feed through rss to any website.

Jello has really done it this time with their new dirt flavored jello aka tofu.

I really just wanted to show this off so there is really no "how to" here. I'm not gonna re-invent the wheel and do a "how to build a duct tape wallet blog." I followed the guide here ( http://www.rpi-polymath.com/ducttape/duct_tape_wallet.html ) for the most part and improvised a bit.

For the sound chip I was going to put something together myself, but when I realized I could get the complete kit for under $10 I thought it was crazy to waste time building my own. Here is the sound chip I used.

After I recorded the sound I cut off the microphone and the button to save space. I got it from a company called BigDawgs. Pro tip: get it on ebay they're $5.99 on ebay and twice that on the BigDawgs website.

Here are a few pictures of the finished wallet and a video of the sound chip in action. Enjoy…

Video

Fear not friends there is a simple solution that will allow you to fully test your site on the live server before switching the DNS to make it live to the rest of the world.

All you have to do to make this dream a reality is point your local hosts file to the ip of the new server. Then when you go to the url in your web browser the hosts file will override everything and send you to the new server. This guide is broken in to 3 sections: Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Before you get started you should at least have a basic understanding of DNS and how it works. At the VERY least you need to understand A records and how they work. If you don't please don't ask me just google "how dns works" or something to that effect and do some reading on your own.

Mac OS X

• Open terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
• type: sudo edit /private/etc/hosts
• Enter your password
• Edit the hosts file. (see details below)
• Save and close the editor

Linux

• Open terminal
• type: sudo nano /etc/hosts
• Enter your password
• Edit the hosts file. (see details below)
• Save and close the editor

Windows

• Open a command prompt (Start > run > "cmd")
• type: notepad C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Edit the hosts file. (see details below)
• Save and close the editor

Edit host file

This part is basically the same for all 3 system. The hosts file is extremely simple. It is just an ip address and a domain name separated by a space or tab

You should have something like this in the file (at the very least) this is connecting the loop back ip to the localhost host name.

127.0.0.1     localhost

You can associate any domain you want to any IP address and your computer will listen to your host file first before the outside world. For example if you wanted google.com to take you to my site you'd do the following.

74.84.131.77     google.com

If my server was set up to understand requests for google.com you would see my site. Instead you'll see our site not found page.

Conclusion

Once you've completed these steps you should be able to go to your web browser and enter the old site domain and have it pointed (just on your computer) to the new server. This will allow you to fully test the site before updating the domain / dns settings for the rest of the world to see.

Mac OS X 10.5 and after (leopard)

lookupd -flushcache

Mac OS X 10.4 and before (tiger)

lookupd -flushcache

Windows

ipconfig /flushdns

Linux

Depending on your distro and configuration one of the following should work fine. Don't worry regardless of your setup all of these command should be safe they just might not do anything.

/etc/init.d/nscd restart

service nscd restart

/etc/init.d/named restart

/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

nscd -i hosts

/etc/init.d/networking restart