OK, time for another post from the wonderful world of kaizen!
A few weeks ago, I began reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware.

It’s one of those books that is full of self-improvement and self-organization principles and tips, 2/3rds of which you’ve either picked up from elsewhere, or have worked out yourself; but seeing them consolidated in one place (along with lots of other things you didn’t know) makes it incredibly useful. ¹

At the time I started writing this post, I was 16 pages in. As I finally sit down to finish this post, I’m now about two-thirds through, which is already a clue – I’m re-appraising what gives me value (Lean Development-style) in my life, and prioritising to churn out posts all the time is not once of them. A blogger I am not.

But, near-obsessive note-taking and logging for both documentation and reflective purposes, is! ² And hence this post.

What kicked this off was the early suggestion to capturing thoughts & notes on physical paper (not computerised to-do lists). And also, having them on you at all times, to capture all thoughts.

This is a no-brainer idea, & I’ve tried this before, but I’ve found it surprisingly hard to implement. Historically, I’ve been both good and bad at this; making scrappy, hand-scrawled notes everywhere, which were then lost or indecipherable, even if I could read them. And, I try to travel light these days – I’ve tried this idea before, using notepads, but – you guess it – I’d leave them behind. So I’d use notes on my phone, tools such as Remember The Milk, etc.,  but they steer you towards linear to-do lists, missing out much of the context of the thoughts (assuming they can even be considered “things to do” in the first place).

So, to keep them in once place (& not written on my hand!), I had the great idea of adding it to my keys, which I have with me whenever I leave the house. But can you find a small, lightweight notebook & pen combo? Nope. Not even the highly-recommended Moleskin do any. The Zebra telescopic pen looked promising, but for £5!?!

One trip to WHS Smith led to a cheap spiral-bound notepad. Problem: cutting the notepad to fit made the paper all scruffy (especially round the edges of the holes, if you’ve ever tried this you know what I mean).

Then a trip to Rymans. Hooray! Look what I found:

It’s a set of Study Cards and a chained pencil!

You’re meant to write on them as some kind of memory test for studying, but I re-purposed them. Perfect, eh?

OK, no. The shortened pencil was useless – when short enough to keep in the pocket, I couldn’t really hold it, or move it round to write with! And cutting the pencil down in the first place… well let’s just say I don’t own a pencil sharpener, and going ot work’s Reception to borrow one juts led to them thinking I was some Scrooge figure trying to get the last life out of a well-used pencil.

So instead… Ryman’s to the rescue again – it’s a Sharpie Mini! Chainable, but the writing part is free-moving.(Incidentally, this is also the first time I’ve ever owned, or even used, a Sharpie. Yes, it’s true, American readers.)

I’ve been using this for about a month now, and in collaboration with other material from the book, I’ve noticed a marked improvement. Every week or so I go through the notes and add them permanently to a reflective journal, Remember The Milk, work plans, etc., as needed.

I’m pleased at how well it is capturing random thoughts that would otherwise have been ‘oh note this down later’, and lost. It’s interesting to see the same phrase written more than once, as I clearly go ‘yeah, great idea, must not forget this’… more than once.

Bonus picture: buckyballs!

Another major topic of the book is making use of the “R-mode Brain”. Read The Book for more, but basically harnessing the “right side of the brain” in a useful way for left-brained, linear people. Got these malleable magnetic balls for myself to use during phone meetings, thought periods, etc. They’re quite addictive.

There’s also the Dreyfus model of learning, but that’s another story / post…

Went to this on Monday, it seems to have been a bit of an activity trigger, so thought I’d add – OK, bit of a copy-and-paste cheat for this one – it’s from an internal post I made for other people’s interest at work – internal references removed.

Earlier this week I went to http://www.meetup.com/es-london/calendar/14829629/ – a highly interesting & informative event about search technologies at The Guardian, a long-running UK newspaper at the forefront of digital publishing.

I’m expecting that the presentations given will be published online, in the interim here are some points you may find interesting:

• Initially various in-house and customised search technologies in the mid-90s, has had to grow massively in scope and content
• Now consolidating on Apache Solr – this is powerful enough to run out-of-the-box, yet scale to serve millions of documents across all their properties – they are even migrating 3rd-party applications
• To ensure the search is scalable, their search schema is kept simple – most searches are by freetext, and curated tags. They then use search features such as faceted search & related items to do the heavy lifting
• Expanding into Linked Data and Reference IDs – http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/blog/linked-data-open-platform for more
• Even given they are in the content publishing business, published content is basically a frontend to a bunch of search queries – ’search as a platform’ – http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2010/10/19/when-search-isnt-just-search-at-the-guardian/
• They are constantly adding content via a system of automated indexing/replication, 24 hours a day. They have optimised their publishing system for continual, incremental updates rather than large pushes
• They have also opened the technology, and the content – to the world – http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform describes their Open Platform
• That link is a bit of a kid-in-a-candy-store one (this must be how our users feel when we do a Data Upload ) – some sections I found useful are http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/faq , http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog , http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/content-api-content-search-reference-guide , and…
• http://explorer.content.guardianapis.com/ to explore the content itself – http://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=spending+review&order-by=newest&format=json
  - http://explorer.content.guardianapis.com/#/search?tag=sport%2Fboxing%2Csport%2Fchess&order-by=newest&format=json
• Their strategy appears to be, as a content organization, to invest in the platform as a core resource, and then expose it for use by partners – “Our vision is to weave the Guardian into the fabric of the Internet, to become ‘of’ the web rather than ‘on’ the web.” They are already seeing large benefits with their commercial partners from this approach – http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/10/guardian-open-platform-it-or-innovation.html

Lastly, http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2010/10/search-at-the-guardian-event.php is a summary from one of the speakers, with some good thoughts about ‘broken search’.

Here’s a quick one that annoys me: trailer posters where everyone is unrealistically clustered together.

I know, I know, but here we go, this is what started it off:

MicMacs. This is from a couple of years ago, I have no idea what the film is about, but it’s still plastered over Tube walls due to decreased physical advertising spend. The heads are slightly distorted, as if to promote the illusion where a painting is looking at you.

But that just serves to make it obvious how unlikely it is that the major characters are just going to stand around like this. Yes, I know it’s a framing / marketing device… but it’s simultaneously unnatural, but apparently unnoticed compared to other well-known tricks; possibly due of marketing’s tendency to stick human faces on everything to appeal to people? Maybe it’s just me.

Here’s another offender rattling around in my brain for years:

“Nacho Libre”. Why is the kid pulling a face? Why is the nun… just stood there?

And lastly, there are adverts for some ITV costume drama. It took me about ten minutes to google that it is Downton Abbey, which appears to be the usual formulaic stuff (there’s a reason I’ve semi-trained myself to ignore adverts as much as possible, he said in a post all about advert posters), but the adverts, which I can’t find online, consists of a Victorian family photograph. That actually makes sense they’d all be standing there looking at you. Hurrah!… until I was googling around to track this programme down, and what do I find?

Bah!

I went to the Protest The Pope demo yesterday (& the Nope To Pope Party fundraiser on Friday night). Very nicely done, the best protest march/demo I’ve ever been to, and my hats off to the organisers.

I feel strangely compelled to mention my views on this, and political protests in general, so… here they are.

First, my reasons for protesting are the ones shared by a lot of people:

• the Pope is the head of a very rich world organisation that places itself between God and humanity, and so above the law
• charging the British taxpayer up to £100million to lecture us about how we are backward sinners who should do what we’re told
• having a rather dodgy past on covering up organized child abuse
• complicity with Nazism and the Holocaust
• “we are doing God’s work, all else is gossip”
• distortion of secular and progressive movementsas (for this visit)  third world aggressive secularists who want to ban Christmas
• etc. etc. And that’s without getting into the religious/political aspects

Frankly, I suspect you’ll have either heard all this before (and may largely agree with me), or you haven’t, and I may sound like those people the Daily Mail warned you about.

I went by myself; I usually do, as no-one I know wants to go to them. It’s a bit lonely, but on the other hand I can move about freely. Pictures are on Flickr. Highlights (apart from all the amazing placards and speeches, of course) include me being given a pack of ‘Sin Condoms’ because I ‘looked evil’, being asked to pose with a family of Indonesian tourists on the grounds of my jacket and hat (& there I was just wearing something randomly suitable, already aware of being photographed a lot, imagine if I’d dressed up), and afterwards finding myself in a threeway of an Islamist megaphone squad, a set of raucous Catholic flag-wavers, and Teh Poep himself!!one! The Pope was mysteriously looking the other way the whole time. ¹

Right, so I’ve always had an interest in political demonstrations. Not necessarily the aims behind them, but the demos themselves; the act of a minority group expressing a political opinion (mostly by marching in Central London, with a long & distinguished history, which I am vaguely aware of). I’ve always had a “interested layman” approach to these, and for many years, just going along to them (& related ‘alternative sub-culture’ stuff) out of casual interest as a person who calls himself liberal & progressive.

Living in Portsmouth, I’d occasionally go to alternative fairs, politics meetings advertised on the Internet, and so on – usually a disappointment – I’d arrive to find no-one else had turned up, or it was just a bunch of stalls selling tat ² or once an alarmly middle-class dreadlocked lady with a plummy accent urging us to go and slap apartheid stickers (in 2004) on bottles of milk in Tesco, which was apparently the giddy height of subversion.

Moving to London has increased my habit; from times I bothered with Flickr, here’s a Stop The War demo over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon but really about Blair’s invasion of Iraq, this is a Time To Go march over nuclear disarmament, but really about wanting Blair to resign. I went to the big anti-Iraq war demo in 2003, of course. In the last year or two alone, I’ve been to The Wave demo over climate change (really about everything from the Middle East, to protesting about Starbucks from people drinking from Starbucks cups, to wanting Gordon Brown to resign) , the G20 mass demo (the absolute motherlode of random crap – pick a topic!), a bunch of interchangeable Middle East demos…

Whilst writing this, I’m trying to remember one in the summer where all I can remember is in the middle of the demo march, about a hundred people ‘occupying’ a Tesco Metro for no apparent reason, a bunch of people singing opera at the top of their voices to draw people over, a bunch of security guards scared to even move because of all the cameras pointing at them, and the non-protesters caught inside trying not to panic. Lots of incoherent shouting, whistles, samba drums, etc. The guards refused to let any more people in (chants of “POLICE BRUTALITY!”), after a few minutes those inside got bored and left, the crowd moved on. Unbelievably puerile and counter-productive. No, I can’t remember what the demo was meant to be about.

So, you’ve gathered my theme here – I get disillusioned with how the majority of political demos are implemented, because they lack focus to the point of having no meaning, fail to think strategically, and generally appear to be an excuse for what appears to be a set or career protesters to turn up, shout about something random, and head off to Starbucks/Pret/McDonalds after – “see you at the next one!” This appears to be deliberate on the part of the organisers, to focus on generating noise rather than results.

And bear in mind this is from someone going to them (admittedly hanging around the outside); I can only imagine how it looks to the those in influence and/or the general public, who, remember, are the people they are supposedly trying to reach…

Which is why I was very pleased with the Protest The Pope demo – it had a clear stated aim, everyone knew what they were there for, and so forth. There’s a reason they were apparently expecting 2,000 people, but got over 12,000. Watch and learn, demo organisers, if you really want to raise conciousness. ³

And an aside, if someone is reading this going “you don’t understand demos!”: Yes, I think do, thankyou. I’m well aware of the nature of grassroots participation, anomie, self-organisation, the network effect, how the organisers have no real control over who turns up and what happens, etc. etc. I’ve seen how Obama got elected, how the Suffragettes won the vote, and the struggle for LGBT rights, taking three random examples. I’m all over open source software and Agile development; the domain knowledge is transferable. Are you aware of the value of incremental & adaptive work? Do you read Global Guerillas? Give it a try sometime. Right, passive-aggressive credentials inspection over.

OK, I’m rambling now, so I’ll wrap this up. At the Pope demo, there were a bunch of Socialist Worker’s Party activists, shouting ‘NO TORY CUTS – SIGN THE PETITION’. This is the crux of my problem. I’m far from the first to point this out, but without any focus, it is pointless, directionless noise. Do you think David Cameron is going to reverse plans to cut taxes for the rich, and raise them for the poor based on a petition signed by five hundred people at an event his voters have never heard of? Really? He wouldn’t do it if it was fifty million. (Hell, my knowledge of economics is limited, so I wouldn’t take much notice of any rambling petition I signed, and I am me.) If I go to a meeting about closing down public transport/surgeries/abuse refuges/other social infrastructure, only to be lectured that the first step is to leave Palestine, do you think that’s actually going to achieve anything?

This is the sort of kitchen-sink, monolithic approach that has gotten the Pope into this situation in the first place.

In a recent post about, ooh, three months back, I gave an overview of managing my personal workflow.

Basically, I’m not finding a self-management system like Personal Kanban to be of much use.

• Tasks seem to be either ‘to-do’ or ‘done’; there is no ‘doing’ stage, so recording the progress states of items give no value & just creates overhead, especially as there’s no Kanban-style application for my Android phone. I’m finding Remember The Milk and Google Calendar to be more useful (just logging tasks in Google Calendar seems about the right level)
• Over the last few years my life has become more stabilised, but also time-poor. I never seem to have the ’space’ to do things, but also never seem to have large gulfs of time in which I’m doing nothing. (Where does the time go? Age-old question, I know)
• Repetitive tasks (literally those set up to repeat) in RTM seem to get done, whereas unique tasks – where one imagines the value is – generally don’t (perhaps they need further decomposition?).
• Agile/Lean systems like Scrum/Kanban haven’t really taken off at work, being still largely plan-based rather than adaptive; so the expected driver/pressure on my personal life isn’t present.
• In reverse, I’m also spending a lot of time just trying to catch up on personal tasks; recently had the idea of ‘personal slack’, where I reserve time for misc projects (not ‘goof off’ time) similarly to Google’s 20% time. Time to link to a book I’ve never read!
• I’ve largely given up on Google Reader, I can never get through it. Don’t even get me started on social media like Twitter. How do other people do it? I guess most of them are “social media types” whose actual job is to camp on Twitter all day with a megaphone and soapbox to hand.
• I’m picking up bad habits, in that overloading myself with multiple projects (Lose weight! Tone up! Learn to properly swim! Learn German! Oh, and do weekend programming too.)

So, it now seems to me the challenge is to add more productivity/value into the time spent, not just “do more” (insert well-worn Dilbert cartoon here).

I considered running a poll on “what to try next” but given this blog’s low readership, think the results would be embarrassingly disappointing

So, this leads me into various meta-organizational activities like goal setting & avoiding procrastination, but this is largely familiar ground & so delivers little 80%/20% value. After sleeping literally most of last Sunday for no apparent reason, I’m also fed up of needing 9 hours sleep a day, so training my body to use less sleep. Rising at 6:00am for a week to get more done in the morning… such as writing this blog post to encapsulate how things are right now.

Right now I feel terrible Just had a conversation with my housemate about the apparent futility of forcing my body to go against the grain; I’ve always needed a decent amount of sleep but when I get it, in the mornings I’m on better form than a lot of people I know. Also the feeling of staying in lots of nights to just get things done, but never seeming to get anywhere… even the idea of taking my holiday shower gel bottles to work for use in showering there after swimming seems like a huge revelatory idea, but that’s silly.

Three weeks later

Well, it’s three weeks later & I still didn’t make this post, other things took priority. So, the bottleneck isn’t there. I have managed to clear down many other tasks though. And also, as expected, I already had my sleep time optimized (or I need 9 hours naturally) – after a week, I found myself having lie ins (& being pleased at the extra time available to do it, false economy eh?), and then, when I got the flu, all the personal progress all went out of the window…

I’m keeping this post as it is a good example of the rambling train of thought that happens when I try & write a coherent blog post at 6:30am

Rumour has it that Google is about to launch another social networking service, Google Me.

So apropos of little, here’s a very interesting presentation by a Google staffer on their research into social networks.

If they can incorporate this quality of research into a social network (Facebook seems to have little interest in this area beyond land grabs; are they starting to just sit on the money?), and make it stick compared to their various attempts (cross ref: my frustration with the high level of noise on Google Buzz, the constant flood of junk and self-promotion on Twitter, etc.), then they might be on to something…

Earlier this month I went for ten days holiday to southern Germany (mostly the Black Forest) & Switzerland.

People asked me to take lots of photos to live vicariously through them; I’ve now uploaded them to Flickr. Yes, this is mostly an upload bung (too many photos! I’ve largely given up on the Facebook album as they got uploaded in a mixed-up order & re-organising them is a right pain); I also have videos but am checking out which service to use.

Based on what people have asked me, you may find this interesting:

• This was the first time I’d been to continental Europe for some twenty years; previously was family holidays as a child/teenager
• I went by myself; I also went camping, with a rucksack. It saved money & I wanted to do camping again, complete with Trangia stove.
• A major part of this holiday was no real plan, just the freedom of doing whatever I felt like. Was planning on Austria & maybe even Slovakia; next time…
• Despite knowing very little German, I had no problem navigating two foreign countries on my own. Admittedly, most people speak English (“the tourist’s language”, it was called), but that was people’s largest concern out of the way
• I’ve bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10 for the trip; it does HD video & geo-tagging of photos; the location map shows this feature is usable, but not perfect (if the every-few-minutes GPS update fails due to signal strength, don’t use it to determine where you were, especially if you’ve just stepped off a train). The TZ10 also developed a spot on the sensor & is being 28-days repaired…
• Places included; Basel (for the flight); Freiburg, The Black Forest (Schwarzwald), Feldberg, Interlaken, Berne & Zurich (as train stopovers, not impressed), Schaffhausen & the Rheinfall (much nicer) and various touristy train stops such as Schlossee lake and Lauterbrunnun. It may not surprise that I felt somewhat at home in Freiburg & Schaffhausen, but felt like aright tourist in Switzerland.
• It was very nice & brought on a lot of personal reflection. Preferred the Black Forest to Interlaken. I’m planning on learning more German (ho ho ho, yeah like I have the time to do that!) & going again, maybe at year’s end….

When I posted about the Public Facebook Feed, I hinted about the long development time. I’ve also mentioned my use of Personal Kanban.

Well, it’s been a few weeks, and still not gotten around to this post, which discusses my usage of it and similar tools in organising my own life. As the delay also implies, this is a mixed bag so far.

Reminder of intent here:

• Organize my personal life. I wouldn’t call myself disorganized, rather I’d like to be more productive
• Apply lean/agile software development tools/approaches in my personal life to this end. A very good starting point for more info is Personal Kanban, which I’m going with over other Scrum or heavyweight systems like Get Things Done, which appears firmly to be in the “add endless embellishments” stage

The two main mechanisms are Visualize your work and Limit your work-in-progress. I’d like to use something like AgileZen, but it has no data import-export. So I’m sticking by Remember The Milk for now, especially as it has an app for my old Windows Mobile phone, and my new HTC Desire.

So, what do I feel the main impediments are here? I feel it exposes that:

• My current setup encourages a ‘todo list’ mentality
• There is no feel of the ‘flow’ that is supposed to occur – the “Goals/Tasks/Backlog/Doing/Done”. Instead, it’s more “ToDo/Done” with little rhythm or awareness of greater goals. I’m unsure if this is an issue, a benefit (“fit the process to suit you”) or if it’s a barrier to being hyperproductive
• I somehow never seem to have the time to significantly work through the backlog

I’ve talked this over with a few people, including people at work also involved with Agile & our use of Kanban there, and personal friends involved in management-like activities. No conclusion was reached.

So why don’t I feel as productive as I should? I’m not exactly sat around watching TV all day. And when I e.g. do watch TV with my housemates, it’s usually with my netbook with me, multitasking. (Side note, I’ve noticed an increased ability to do this, something well-documented as Internet technology encroaches. To the point where if I’m doing just one action that isn’t at work, my brain feels like it’s idle & starts to chug over some other task in the background, to my annoyance if foreground task is, y’know, important, like a conversation or something. Even now, I find myself saying “C’mon!”to the computer as I want to get this post finished and move on to some other task, and it doesn’t respond as fast as my thought processes, which already feels several steps ahead).

Maybe it’s good old-fashioned information overload (or rather, the filters are broken), but this seems like a cop-out.

Perhaps my throughout is at an effective high already so I get few returns? My life work-in-progress limit is “full”. But a) I don’t seem to have much to show for it, and b) there’s lots of talk about being hyperproductive. Perhaps the value I think I should give items isn’t the value I actually give them. Or maybe I am just reaching an effective life balance between “doing stuff” and “living life”?

It doesn’t feel very balanced, though. Just like my Google Reader list which constantly has thousands of unread items, I have a lot of items to do, books to read, etc. that never happen. (Upstairs is an unopened copy of The Guardian I bought yesterday, the first in many years, bought as a symbolic gesture as they switched support from Labour to the Liberal Democrats for the imminant General Election.. Have a feeling it may not actually get read.)

This “never ending pile” is a common feature of life, I know, but it seems more acute now than at any other stage of my life, which hints something else is going on – maybe my work-in-progress limit is in practice lower than what I think it is (a common Kanban issue)… Reviewing this post before I hit ‘Publish’, it seems more like a random infodump from a hyperactive brain. Maybe I’ve just had a bit too much coffee on not quite enough sleep?

This is certainly not a definitive post, and hope to follow up on it sometime soon(!); I’m pretty sure I’ve read items dealing with this on the Personal Kanban site. Perhaps this is a self-perpetuating shallow loop whereby I am missing some component and so never really ‘get into it’?

Went to the Facebook F8 Conference Keynote last night; it was extended into London due to the volcanic ash.

Facebook’s juggernaut just gets bigger & bigger. There were some very powerful platform announcements made, to basically extend themselves over the entire internet, including sucking every page/object on the web into their ecosystem; these explain them much better than I could:

• The Next Evolution of Facebook Platform
• The Graph API

This also raises a few hackles with me, mainly:

• a) the fast disappearance of the Anonymous/Private Web; all sites will know who you are by default and store lots of information about you & your activity, and how it all interrelates.
• b) all this information lives inside Facebooks’ servers, not on the Open Web.

Anyway, somewhat typically paradoxically, I’ve bunged up a couple of Social Plugins on the site as a test (see above & left); they really are just as easy as adding some HTML to your Wordpress templates. ¹ Yes, no-one visits this site, but that’s not the point!! (nerdy rolleyes).

I’m not really bothered about the ‘compelling social experience married with rich metadata’ blahblah on my personal site here, but I would be rather worried if I ran a site heavy with user interaction, like say Lovefilm.com who was a launch partner last night.

They’re already finding themselves having to use Facebook to get some kind of user experience/marketing edge. You know how Windows is slowly, quietly dying, since everyone just does everything through a web browser? Give it a few years, that could be you; Facebook having pretty much hollowed out your entire business model & you’re basically a server farm wrapping around their platform. And Facebook want 25% of your ad revenue.

It was very interesting to see Microsoft playing second fiddle to Facebook as it is…

Since Facebook changed their privacy settings last year, I’ve been looking for a way to display public updates – and only my public updates – to the world.

But, of course, Facebook has other ideas. I was at first expecting them to show up on my public profile page, but no; it’s an fully public profile or nothing… and you have to be logged in to Facebook to see it. A Twitter-style lifestream is not on the cards, it seems. And you can’t use RSS feeds either, as they include no privacy information, thus you can’t filter for ‘Everyone’ content.

So, I’ve given up on waiting for Facebook to follow up on the initial ‘Everyone’ noise, & have written a PHP Facebook Platform application to retrieve these public updates myself.

The application is at http://apps.facebook.com/publicstatusfeed// http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=331369174049. The FB app is just an iframe pointing to the application code on my website, at http://vodex.net/publicstatusfeed/.¹

I’ve released the application code at http://code.google.com/p/publicfacebookfeed/. Please note this is in an initial release. There is not much documentation, test cases, or any caching, for example. ²

How to use

• Visit http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/ ; you’ll be taken to http://apps.facebook.com/publicstatusfeed/ to grant the application some permissions. Click ‘Allow’ a few times.
• http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/rss.php?uid=YOURFACEBOOKUSERID is now an RSS feed of your public updates!

Whew, that was easy. Note that if you’re not OK with my website accessing your Facebook activity, please download the code & set it up yourself on your own server.

I’ve also put up a human-readable diagnostic page, at http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/core.php?uid=YOURFACEBOOKUSERID. Mine is at http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/core.php?uid=802410391.

How it works

Sadly, I didn’t enjoy developing this – Facebook Platform has a reputation for a volatile API & incomplete documentation. In total, it took me around 12 hours (admittedly spread out over some months of leisure time) for what should have been a reasonably simple task.

I also found a few forum posts etc. of other developers attempting this, but no working applications or real guidance. Perhaps no-one is that interested in this area? Statistically speaking, I find it surprising that I am the first to publicly figure this out.

Anyway, do something similar to the below (or check out the code):

• Your application must request offline_access and read_stream extended permissions.
• When the user authorises, store their session key (MySQL works just fine). These used to be called ‘infinite session keys’.
• The session key allows you to access the user’s content without having to go via the Facebook UI. In the script to actually get the content, create your Facebook client and then set the session key to that which you stored earlier. Do not go through requiring permissions again, as that’d trigger the Facebook UI, which you don’t want if e.g. the server is polling an RSS feed, with no human in sight
• For the content itself, use Stream.get, and not the more obvious (& apparently deprecated) Status.get, as that doesn’t allow querying by privacy. (Hat tip to the Facebook Developer stand at the PHP Conference for this!)
• Get streams for given userID with privacy of ‘EVERYONE’ and then do interesting things with it.

So there we go; I can now finally have public Facebook activity in this site’s lifestream. If there’s interest in this application (i.e. I’m not just scratching my own itch), I’ll look to proceed further with it.