FaviconGrabber and Social Graph
Date : 2008 03 24 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianAlistair Rutherford has written a nice looking Flex application that visualizes the Social Graph API:
Alistair told us about the application, and some of the fun features:
The initial version was a bit boring looking so I thought it would be nice to pull the 'favicons' for the sites returned in the results. I have detailed how I did this here
Because I could not fetch the icons directly using HTTPService I have used a cgi proxy script written in Python to fetch the target icons and convert them into a Base64 encoded string before returning the data to the Flex application.
The Flex application decodes the Base64 and then passes the data to a modifed version of the IconLoader class from the flexlib library.
The modifications to flexlib took the form of adding in support for 8bpp and 24bpp images.
The graph is implemented using the flexvizgraphlib visualisation component from here:
The application also uses a novel IFrame component which lets you
embed html pages directly into your Flex application.