Dance Weekend

But not much to show for it.  But that’s not such a bad thing.  It’s been a long, slow week of behind-the-scenes coding on the DanceWeekend app on Facebook.  I realized I’d made a false step due to Facebook’s data access and storage restrictions and the way they handle displaying data on tabs and profile pages.  I didn’t realize, until I tried it, that when you access a tab on someone’s page, that tab doesn’t have access to Facebook’s API data such as that user’s friends and events.  For many apps, that wouldn’t be a problem but since DanceWeekend relies heavily on Facebook’s “social graph”, it’s a bit of a problem.  And I’m not allowed to store any information about the relationships between users and events or users and other users.  Argh!

Oh well, it wouldn’t be fun if it were easy, I guess.  I was hoping to get the tabs and profile boxes sorted out before moving on to other functionality like passes and housing and such because that visibility is needed to spread the word about DanceWeekend and help it reach the “tipping point” of usage among dancers.  But I’m going to have to let this one sit for a bit and subconsciously workout a solution to the problem while I work on other things.  And there are already over 800 dancers who’ve added the app from it’s LindyWeekend days so spreading the word isn’t a huge deal, I guess.

The next feature on the to-do list for DanceWeekend is the buy/sell passes functionality.  I’m not sure how much use it’ll see but it’s an important feature if for no other reason than it’ll help me solidify how I want to build the user-to-user interaction model for the housing functionality.  Keep an eye out for it as I hope to have it rolled out by the end of the weekend.

Keep the leather-side down.