Facebook Video aggregator

Web application that displays all the videos (public) uploaded by a page on facebook. The objective of the project was to gain insights and be comfortable using Facebook Graph-API.

I created this application out of a need to browse through videos of TASTY. I was all hungry and I realized there was an excess of content which I didn't want viz. comments made by others, the long time it took to populate the page etc.

Thus, I thought of creating an application that will show all the videos at my page without having to visit it in facebook.

Project Description & Development

In order to create a web application that involves using facebook Graph-API, one must have an application already running. There must be an existing server that should be deploying resources to it's client.

The entire project was developed in 7 days and I had no prior experience developing such application(s). This entire project was developed because I hustled and I took steps which you may think is counterproductive, but at that time it was a life-saver for me.

So, I had three issues:

1. Having an existing application: If there wasn't an existing application, then facebook login button will not be rendered. The static pages in my local systems wouldn't even continue to the main implementation. My Soln: I pushed my repo to srajappa.github.io repository which was a server that rendered the index.html page. Things worked, but the only downside was I had to push code for every change I made. I know ! things could have done little better. After taking inputs from experts and friends I found out that I could use mockservers (so that I don't have to push to the repo) or a dev environment (to ensure facebook Graph-API to run) or a data stubs (to contain all the facebook Graph-API responses to facilitate the operations). The thing was I got this input quite late, when I was about to finish developing the application. So, next time I will definitely put this into use.

2. Tweaking the Graph-API calls:
   I thank the developers at Stackoverflow and my friends helped me a ton understanding the Graph-API calls. It was a tedious task understanding the calls, but once I understood it all was easy.

3. UI-related issues: I used Modal bootstraping to load the facebook login button. As Facebook Graph-API restricts only 25 videos per request, I only loaded 25 videos initially. I also loaded new videos whenever the scrollable event fired and it reached the bottom of the page. I wish to improve this application more by using templating to load the next 25 videos. Templating will help load the content in less time compared to the current technique.

Running the application

Clone this repo (or your own fork!) to your home directory (/Users/username).

$ cd ~
$ https://github.com/srajappa/facebookPageVideoCatalogue.git

Change into the directory and then run the myApp.

$ cd face
$ ./myApp

Future updates

I have some plans to update the repo by adding new features like Templating and enable users to add page that they want to render. Stay tuned !! I will also be involved in improving the way I develop such applications. ☀️

Contributing

How did I present ? How did I code ? Any feedback ? Let me know @cruiousCOCO