There's actually tons of bugs with the app, so use at your own caution. Also,
no error checking whatsoever is performed. I wrote the whole thing in less
than 2 hours.

The script now supports retrieving random birthday greetings from a list of
text files. These greetings are optionally gender sensitive.

Getting this app to run isn't trivial, but I'll try to outline the steps:

1. Add the fb developer app: http://www.facebook.com/developers/

2. Go to the Developer application and click "Set Up New Application". Give
   your application a name, check to accept the Terms of Service, then click
   Submit.

3. Set the "callback URL" and "Post-Authorize Redirect URL" in the app's
   properties to anything valid like http://www.shamsshafiq.com/. It will
   never be used, but it needs to be set.

4. Create a "friend list" on your fb profile called 'BirthdayReminders' and
   add some people to this list. You can call this list whatever you like,
   but make sure you change it in settings.php.

5. Extract the contents of the attached zip file to your Apache document
   root.

6. Download the Facebook Developer PHP Client Library from
   http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/packages/facebook-platform.tar.gz,
   extract it and add the facebook-platform/ directory to your include path

7. Edit settings.php to match your settings. Make sure you populate the
   api_key and secret_key variables based on the app you just created.

8. CD into that directory and use php to execute initialize.php from the
   command line.

9. Firefox should launch, and you will need to grant the new app you just
   created access to your fb profile. After this, close this window/tab.

10. Hit enter on the command line, and firefox should launch again, this time
    with the results page.

If you run into problems in any of these steps, let me know (paste the exact
error message). Also give me the api_key and secret_key for testing. Email me
settings.php as well if necessary.

For the message greetings, just create .txt files in the same folder like I
have. Files starting with 'm' will be used for males and those starting with
'f' will be used for females. All other files are assumed to be gender
neutral.

Cheers,
Rajesh <rajesh@meetrajesh.com>
Tue Dec 23 2008 08:17 PM PST