Getting Facebooker app to run in subdirectory

When I set up My Trips, my Facebook app that I used the Facebooker gem for the Facebook interface for, I intended to run it as a subdirectory of my domain name. This way I could set up multiple Facebook apps with the same domain name and IP address. However, no matter what I tried, I could not get everything to work correctly. I thought that it was issues with my web server, Nginx. However, after looking in to this more I found that it was an issue with Facebooker. You'll have to edit a Facebooker source code file. It's best to unpack the gem to your vendor directory, that way you can edit this file for the specific project.

Once you've unpacked it, edit the file vendor/gems/facebooker-1.0.xx/lib/facebooker/rails/facebook_url_rewriting.rb. Modify the relative_url_root method to the following:

class Base
class << self
alias :old_relative_url_root :relative_url_root
def relative_url_root
#Facebooker.path_prefix
'/subdirectory_name'
end
end
end

Where subdirectory_name is the name of the subdirectory that you want to run this app from. This is a bit of a hack, hard coding the directory that you want to run from, but it works. After you do this, you'll then have to configure your web server to run your app in a subdirectory. For Nginx with Passenger, simply add "passenger_base_url /subdirectory_name" to your nginx.conf in the server { } block. Now you can change your Canvas URL to http://www.yourdomainname.com/subdirectory_name.

Twitter and LinkedIn

I've finally gotten with the times and have set up profiles on Twitter and LinkedIn. I'll probably post a bunch on Twitter for a week or so and then forget about it though, we'll see how this goes. I added a gadget to the blog which shows my 3 latest tweets.

@sowersb on Twitter

Brent Sowers on LinkedIn