Welcome to this screencast on the Facebook HTML uncommon tools that I've built.
Let's dive right in. If you've been developing Facebook applications,
you occasionally run into the problem where your server has thrown an error,
but all that the Facebook server throws shows you is this little message.
It can be a 404 or a 500, but the problem is you can't see what the actual output was from your server.
Obviously, you can write these two log files, but this is not always the most useful way of doing it.
So, I built a little tool that will solve this problem for most of you.
What almost nobody knows is that if you look at the source of the Facebook page,
you can see that actually here in this green bit, that's actually the output of your own server.
This is not handy for inspecting what happened with your own server.
The only difference is that all dashes were converted into underscores.
I'll get back to that in a moment.
What I built is a little Facebook HTML Uncovered Book Marklet.
If you drag this bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar,
oh, I had it here already, and then go back to an applications page like this,
if you then press it, it will try to, with a bit of JavaScript, try to get all the comments,
all the hidden output from your server out of the source and show it in a separate screen.
So, that's what happens, and as you can see, this is way more readable than what we just had.
Now, it tries to do some magic, including appending the original document URL
in front of the URLs to images and other relative URLs, like JavaScript files.
This might not always work, kind of depends on your setup, kind of depends on Facebook,
and as you can see, there's loads of underscores where there should be dashes.
So, that's the bookmarklet. This works in almost any modern browser,
so that's great for anybody who doesn't use Firefox.
Now, I use Firefox a lot, and I decided why not try and build a Firefox add-on.
So, when we go back to the blog post and we go to the Firefox add-ons page here,
we can see that there is a nice Facebook HTML uncomment add-on.
Now, it's still an experimental phase, that's because we haven't got enough reviews yet
to get it out of experimental, and that means that there's a couple of things
that you need to know before trying to install it.
First off, you need to log into the add-on service.
Once you've done that, there is a little problem in Firefox
where you have to go into your preferences, and for a moment in the Privacy tab,
check accept third-party cookies.
If we close this and we say add to Firefox, this will try to install
the very little and very easy to use add-on.
Now, we restart Firefox.
Obviously, after this, you can turn off the accept third-party cookies function again
and just use Firefox as you normally use it.
Oh, there it is again. Move to the different screen.
Let's scale that.
It should be installed now, and as you can see here in the bottom corner,
there is a nice little icon.
Oh, and let's go back to an average page.
This little icon is the Facebook developer platform icon.
I might replace it with another icon someday,
but as you can see on this page, it's grayed out,
while on this page, it's nice and blue.
And the blue icon, as you can see, is clickable,
and the clickable icon does basically the same stuff that the bookmarker did.
It will show you in a different screen the output of this page,
the output of your actual server.
So that's it. It's quite easy.
It's easy to install.
All the details will be in the links that come with this video.
So I hope you enjoyed. Bye.
