The From Family.com

Here are the steps I followed to get a Facebook application up and running.

1. Sign up with a web hosting company. I use Bluehost.com for Psychic Connection.

For regular users Facebook appears to run every application, but it actually retrieves the canvas page from your own web hosting company. (The canvas page is the main web page for your application when you press your application button, not the Facebook user profile page.)

So you need a decent web hosting company with good monthly bandwidth transfer limits to get going. Web reviews show Bluehost to be alright.

2. Join Facebook

3. Add the Developer application. Details Here. This application shows you the ongoing efforts of Facebook. Strange to view so many buggy incidents.

4. Previously Facebook only cared about the number of user installs an application had. Now they are moving towards user application interaction for ranking. Daily active users. Just to keep in mind for any application idea.  

 5. Over and over through Google searches I ended up on Tizag.com for help. It is a good site covering HTML, CSS, and PHP. Never knew them before my application developer adventure, but I ended up reading many of their pages.

6. Bluehost has MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and PHP 5.x ready, so that is what I used for development.

7. The required Facebook Application details can be worked out with these Tucows screenshots. 

8. Ad companies for Facebook applications are being created every day.

9. You canvas page can be tracked via Google Anayltics.

10. Keep reading the developer discussion boards for constant news updates.

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