After a hell of a lot of trouble I’ve gotten to the point where I can log in to this site using my Facebook login and post using that login. This is a test of that functionality. Yay!

The next step is to make all new posts on this site end up on my Facebook feed. The whole goal, of course, is to ditch Facebook and do as much as I can from this site instead.

Will I get all of the functionality of Facebook on to this site? Probably not. Is this even worth my time? Probably not. Why am I doing this? Because all of this is a good exercise in getting further in Rails.

It’s also a good exercise in pulling data from an API and displaying it on this page.

Which brings me to Parse. First, it’s expensive. There’s no way I’m going to use it if I ever need a pro account. Second, its javascript API is basically just a fork of Backbone.js. Third, there’s a iOS API built in to it.

That second point brings me to yet another technology that I’ve started getting used to in the last day or so: Backbone.js. The incentive came from both Parse being used at work as well as this article which walked me through a pretty good example of how to structure a basic backbone app.

All in all, pretty cool. I’ve been learning a lot now that I’ve picked up software development again. I’m waiting for a bunch of circuit boards in the mail before I get back into hardware.

And, just so you know, yes, you should be able to log in here with Facebook. No, you probably can’t do anything else. Yet…