It's been a slow week but, then again, it started with me under the knife in the hospital for a minor outpatient surgery.  I've been recovering and that has been the focus of my life since then.

I have, however, been chipping away at a few things.  One of them involves a tweak to the Facebook Connect system.  What I had built presented an extra screen to navigate if you were already logged into Facebook but not logged into the Mercury site.  Now if you go to the FBC link in that circumstance it will log you in and whisk you straight to where you need to be.

At long last I've also added Tagging to blog posts.  I had this in the old PageEdit system for a long time but I never got around to making it happen in Mercury.  So now it works and you can navigate blogs posts by category or by tag.  I also increased the server-efficiency of navigating those pages tremendously.

 If you're reading this as a result of clicking a link on Facebook then you already know that it works!  If you're reading it because you found it on Twitter, well, next best thing!

After a rewriting of FBC I've set it up so that  properly authenticated accounts can have status updates made on their behalf from the Mercury engine.  Right now it's limited to blog posts but it will probably extend to status updates, photo uploads and anything else that makes sense to publish!

While it stil exists as part of Mercury I ended up abandoning the old code I had for facebook connect.  It worked fine for logins and some basic stuff but the new APIs that Facebook has were not playing well with it.  It's been a frustrating process but I have rewritten the Facebook Connect login code in Mercury and have also extended the functionality with the ability to post on the Facebook wall without additional prompting, given a validated account.

I have yet to stitch it into the blog module and I don't know that I'll have time to do that tonight.  But once I do blog posts can automatically be broadcast to both Twitter and Facebook!

We have had Facebook Connect as a part of Mercury for a long time but apart from using Facebook's "social tools" (which require a popup and an extra step to post) we have not spent time working on pushing content directly to a person's wall.

A late night last night led me to the right articles online and the right configuration so that I was able to push a wall update programmatically.  This won't be super useful until I extend it to posting blogs or status updates but it's the most important step!

Although I haven't been posting here very much we have been hard at work on Mercury.  I will be making updates here more often but here is a summary of some of the new things: