Welcome to this week edition of tinkernut.com video cast. In this episode, what we are going to do is create Facebook widgets and what you will need for this is of course a Facebook account and then you will also need a Microsoft Popfly account. This is what is going to create the widgets and what we are going to do is we are going to create the a map of all of your different Facebook friends and we are also going create a carrousel of all your different Facebook pictures so let us get started. The first thing that you are going to want to do is go to www.Popfly.com and sign up for a Popfly account. Now this is through my Microsoft so what you will need to do is if you have a windows live ID you just sign in with that and if you do not then just go ahead and create one but just enter your credentials and then click sign in.
Then what you are going want to do is create a mashup so click on the create a mashup link and this is going to load the mashup interface and you will see on the left hand menu you have all sorts of different option. So the first thing we are going to do is drag a Facebook widget to the stage and it is going to say missing key if this is the first time that you have use it. So just click on that, and it is going to have your request of Facebook key so if you have already have a Facebook account just click log in if not you will need to create one before it will allow you to get a key. So after you log in just click generate and it is going to generate a key for you so just copy that key and then go back to the Popfly account and enter it into there. Then after you click update, you will see that it will change to from missing key to now you have a key so the next thing we are going to do is drag a Virtual Earth widget to the stage and also a GeoNames widget. GeoNames it is a little program that will locate where are Facebook friends are located at, so now if click on the little Facebook tools icon, you want to change the operation to get friends and then you can set the value to however many friends that you want to map. Then you can just click to get out of that and then you want to link the Facebook widget to the GeoNames widget and then go to the GeoNames properties. You want to set the source to Facebook and you want to set the value to city.
Now what you want to do is link both Facebook and GeoNames to the Virtual Earth widget and for the most part whenever you go to the properties of this everything is as it should be. It is getting the information form GeoNames about longitude and latitude and it is getting the pictures from Facebook. So then you can just click preview it is going to bring up a map of the United States or a map of the world depending on where you are located and then it is just going to show some of you friends where they are located at. So it is a pretty neat little widget and you can mess around with that and then if you click customize at the bottom of the screen it will take you back and then you can click save and save your widget. Just type in any name for what you want to call it put in a description I am just going to put map of Facebook friends and then just accept and save and this will save it to your account. Now I will show you what you can do with that later.
All right, we will go ahead and close out of the Virtual Earth and GeoNames widget. We are going to go back to the menu and drag over a PhotoStack widget, and this is just a little display widget and in the Facebook properties, we are going to just set it to get photos of me. You can set it to whatever you want later but this is just for the example then link it to PhotoStack and for the most part the PhotoStack information by default would be right and then you can click preview and it is going to bring up a pictures from your Facebook account.
All right so now, what you want to do is go to My Stuff and then select projects go to mash or you want to share, first you will click share and then it will give you the MashOut option. From here, you can select to send as an e-card, post to your Facebook. If you have this so you can put it as a side bar widget but what I am going to do just to show you what it would look like is, I am going to click embed it and then just copy this little URL here. Then paste it into my web browser and this is going to be the exact URL to the little widget that we created so there is the widget right there.
So that is something that you can show your friends for more go to www.tinkernut.com.
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