Facebook Friends Edit Pencil Disappeared?

September 3, 2009 at 3:04 PM

Here’s a little annoyance, I go to edit the Friends box on my profile on Facebook to make it show more friends, and I noticed the pencil is gone. Great, and it appears people were having this issue for a few days now. I’ve even found a couple of questions on the Facebook Help Center about it. I decided to study the issue, appears it’s a CSS styling error. Appears Facebook is having a lot of these problems recently, and they haven’t fixed them but instead they have been busy publishing press blog posts and interviews, of course.

I first mentioned in that Help Center thread:

This seems to be to happening to all Boxes except for the Information one. It appears to be a CSS styling problem for the pencil not to be appearing.

I have noticed the CSS problems growing (i.e., the header). There have always been cases of boxes popping up randomly too. Hopefully Facebook doesn’t become another MySpace and fixes these issues.

Then later on I found a workaround:

Hmm, it appears I figured out how to pop it out.

If you are using Firefox and have the add-on extension Firebug, do the following:

1. Right click on the Friends label of the Friends box and click Inspect Element.
2. Here it highlights when the console pops up, right above it should say: <div id=”box_app_2356318349″ class=”box”>
This is the one you want. Note that the numbers in the ID may be different, don’t worry about this.
3. Click on the “box” part of the tag and put this in “basic_info_summary”
It should look like this afterwards: <div id=”box_app_2356318349″ class=”box basic_info_summary”>
4. Click the pencil, notice how it pops up now.

This is a workaround I’ve found, hopefully Facebook fixes this, I doubt most users will understand my instructions but I tried my best to clearly to explain them to users having this problem.

So everytime you are going to have to use that workaround to edit the Friends box, or any other box for that matter until they fix the issue (all the pencil icons except for the Information box disappeared for me -.-).

Update: These same instructions for the workaround appear to work for Chrome, according to the Help Center thread.

Update 2: Appears Facebook has fixed this issue.

Posted in Social Networking, Workarounds | Tags: , , ,

MySpace Denies Xbox LIVE Gamercard App Twice

September 2, 2009 at 12:36 PM

In the past I deleted this app as MySpace was never willing to transfer ownership of the app to another account, however it never did get completed deleted as the canvas page still exists but it’s in private (AppID 106649). So until now I decided to recreate the app and upgrade to OpenSocial 0.8, boy was this is big waste of time. This App’s ID was 151011.

First, it was denied for these reasons:

1. Application Description
Apps that require third party registration must clearly state so in their app descriptions.
2. Loading Issues.
The Profile Surface fails to load the content and appears blank.

Okay I’ve address #1 already in the app footers, but I just make it bold and clear in the first paragraph just to satisfy them. #2 only appears when they are using all invalid Gamertags or the API is down, which I addressed by making it say a message if and when this occurs. So I resubmit and wait another 48 hours.

Then, the app gets denied again for these reasons:

1. User Experience / Functionality:
Applications must contain unique content on every application surface (i.e., canvas, home and profile pages must each contain unique content and functionality). The following surfaces are not unique: Home, Profile Surfaces

Well I can’t address #1, because in the past it was this way and they didn’t complain, and I have been requested by app users to do this a long time ago. Here are what these surfaces look like from the app screenshots:

Home Profile
xblcardhome xblcard

There was only one difference between the two, and that is the Change Gamertags link. This was also to help the user find their way around, and this satisfied a lot of users before.

No, I am not going to bother posting in their forums about it, the MDP (MySpace Development Platform) team doesn’t visit it as much anymore, and most of the app denial clarifications get unanswered. Their IRC channel #myspacedev is also dead too, only about 9 users sit in while about 90 are in the #facebook channel. So thanks but no thanks MySpace, I’ll just delete the app instead which means just more bandwidth for me, not like I was getting paid to do this anyways.

Posted in Social Networking | Tags: , , ,