I've been offline for a while (and there are a flurry of posts about that coming up), but I had a very strange thing happen yesterday. Earlier this year, I published the Facebook API Developer's Guide. It seems to be selling reasonably well on Amazon...even broke the top 100 computer books for a couple of days.

Being it's a book on Facebook, I've had a few folks add me as a friend and shoot me messages and ask some questions. It all seemed pretty cool, until yesterday. I got a note from a person in Tunisia who added me as a friend and asked a question. I sent a response thanking him for purchasing my book, and this is where I was a little taken aback. In fact, this was his exact response:

well, to be honest with you i got your book from a torrent site, i would have bought it if i wasnt living in Tunisia, I hope this won't affect anything :)

I didn't quite know what to say. He was nice enough to send the link to the torrent site, and apparently there are 41 seeders and 3 leechers.

At first, I was thinking of trying to get the site to remove the link, but I've been around long enough to know that doesn't really stop anything. I have say that I'm still scratching my head on this one. I'm not sure if I'm flattered that there are people that think its worth stealing, offended that someone would under the pretense of purchasing my intellectual property ask a question (could have just asked, I'm a pretty nice guy), or mad that he stiffed me a 20% commission on a book.

Still trying to figure this one out...

It's been a long while since I posted anything here. Things have been a bit hectic with the launching of a new institutional repository service (using DSpace), taking a computer graphics course (linear algebra, ray tracing, scientific visualization, etc.), and finishing up my book on the Facebook API.

This is the first book I've written and I have to admit it was far more of a task than I had first thought it would be. Not that the subject matter was very dense, but there were at least four major changes in the API that required an almost total rewrite of the code base for the examples. There were even a couple of sections that had to get cut because Facebook "fixed" their code because of security and user concerns (plus a lot of folks "abuse" some of the things you could do with the API).

There are some great Coldfusion resources for building Facebook applications in ColdFusion. The "un-official" ColdFusion client library for Facebook apps is at nearpersonal. There is also a RIAForge starter project for FBML (FBML is a tag based language for Facebook) named Facebook FBML Starter Kit.

So, if you're wanting a short book that highlights some of the more common elements of developing Facebook applications, be sure to check out my book!