Forgive me for not reading this open letter from Mark Zuckerberg until late Friday. I don't login to Facebook as often as I used to, but more on that later. His letter on the further changes to Networks was written Tuesday, so I am sure this is old news to some. I assume Mashable has covered this by now (they have, but they glossed over the negative by-product of the long-overdue privacy changes Zuck announced).

A couple days ago, I upgraded the Movable Type install to 4.261. I had been testing out "Motion" for some time now. While I am not yet ready to roll out our Motion based template, it is well under way. More about that in another post.

What this upgrade means most is support for Google accounts. Once I enable it on all the sites in our install, you will be able to login and comment using your Google account.

The update means a lot more for me behind the scenes, but I will just keep it that way as I am sure you are not interested in hearing about all that techno mumbo-jumbo. But if you are interested in all that cool stuff, knock yourself out.

Now I just need to modify the pages such as the login form, and some other images and such as they were before, customized for BG Views. That should not take long.

The upgrade from MT 4.24 to 4.261 was pretty painless. It required an update to Dan Wolfgang's Hot Date plugin, and the deletion of the AIM and WordPress OpenID plugins, as that functionality is now built in.

Of note, Facebook Connect Commenters is now at 1.1 and did not break anything here. Commenting still works with a Facebook account, and it pulls in Userpics from Facebook too.

Facebook recently announced usernames for both profiles and fan pages. At the last minute, Facebook changed their requirement for fan pages from 25 to 100 fans required - this did not amuse many. Thankfully we have the best fans in the world! We were able to pick our username for our Page at the first availability.

BG News
http://www.facebook.com/bgnews

BG Views Page
http://www.facebook.com/bgviews

Credit where it is due, my friend Jason pointed me in the direction of a site that had a snazzy toolbar at the bottom that had support for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Translate. I figured it could not be home grown, and it took little digging to find it was Wibiya.

My biggest takeaways is that it is not obtrusive, and has a really unique take on using Facebook Connect. It also keeps Twitter, Facebook, (including our Page) Translate, Recent Posts, Subscribe to RSS, Bookmarking, and Flickr -- yes, a ton of stuff -- in a very minimal and very nicely designed interface at the base of the page.

I think it is really important to keep Twitter and Facebook front and center for organizations like ours, and this toolbar does that. Oh, yea, and Wibiya is in beta, they are still making changes and additions. From reading through their Get Satisfaction page, they have already added some changes suggested by the community.

On the Developer Blog here you will find the Wibiya Toolbar, as I am testing it and making sure it works and does not brake things. I have requested the opinions of our Fans on Facebook as well as our Alumni Group, and would like anyone else viewing this to tell me what they think of the toolbar at the bottom of the page. You can even vote in the poll to the right!

Hit the jump for a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo.

Recently BGSU has released an RSS Reader Facebook App. I have been taking a look from the sidelines, as Anthony Fontana has kept me in the loop. They were great to include our RSS feeds in the app, and I am very greatful for that. Right now it include the main feed for BG News and our Breaking News feed.

They want to include our other feeds, such as from our Blog Network, which will happen soon. The issue is that I need to create feeds in the ancient RSS format (our feeds are Atom feeds). This is not a big hurtle, I just need to get a RSS template setup in Movable Type, which will be soon.  I will be sure to update here once it is all set.

I cannot tell you how long I waited for a) Facebook to finally release FB Connect, and b) for Six Apart to release their FB Commenters plugin. After much hard work, the final piece to the puzzle was a Javascript error (FB.Facebook.apiClient.get_session().uid;) that was also conflicting with mt.js - this did screwy things with the "Sign in to comment, or comment anonymously" line above the comment box below.

I submitted a ticket and I need to thank "Cowboy" Ben Alman for replying to it with one fix. I say one fix as Peter Larson left a comment on Tom Keating's VOIP blog with a different solution.

So there you have it. Look at the two lines of code in my signface.js file marked // COWBOY and you will see the fix I am using, thanks to Ben Alman. The only remaining question is going to be: will I have to go through all this crap again when MT 4.25 is final?

One of the main reasons we are launching BG Views is because we don't want college media to be a one way conversation anymore. We want your feedback and your input. Our Community site is made up of Blogs, Forums, and Community Blogs. In the Community Blogs, you have the ability to participate in the writing process.

Signing up for a BG Views Network account will allow you to post articles and entries to our community blogs and forums. It has more features, with others to come, but at the root of it all is the ability to write here on BG Views.

While we would like it (very much) if you would register for a BG Views Network account, we know not everyone wants to do that. That is why we are offering a whole lot of Services to login as, most being OpenID based.

Today while testing Facebook Connect on Windows  - something I just love to do - I found that the "Connect with Facebook" image that facilitates the authentication process is missing in IE 7. Take a look below:

This has got to be why I had a few friends last night that could not sign in with Facebook, they were using Internet Exploder, sorry, I mean Explorer.  I have yet to test this on IE 6 or IE 8 beta 2. I need to go fire up Parallels and do that. Anyways, as a comparison shot, and I cannot simply have a post with only a screen capture of IE, here is what Firefox looks like in Windows:

I am not sure which is more evil, Internet Explorer or Facebook. 11,800,000 results for "facebook evil" and only 2,310,000 for "internet explorer evil," so Facebook FTW!

Oh, and for those counting at home, this is Gotcha #4 for me.

I have to give big thanks to three people: Tom Keating, Chris Hall, and Dan Wolfgang. Even though my PageRank has gone down considerably lately (I don't blog as much as I used to being one major problem in that department) Chris and Tom found my post about my problems with MT 4.23 and the beta Facebook Connect plugin.

I have been chatting with Dan recently as I have been using and testing some of his great plugins. He suggested I use a different Userpics template. The one that ships with MT 4.23 doesn't work for Facebook.