Wondering if anyone out there has a clue if this is possible: I run a large international site that often schedules blog posts in advance, for example, when it's 2am my time, it's 8am somewhere in the world and we want to have a blog go live then. We simultaneously promote via FB and other social sites...scheduling those as well.
Unfortunately, because the blog is unpublished, the FB schedule scrapes "Access Denied" info and this stays sticky, even after the blog becomes live. Thus, currently, I have to manually rescrape at 2am using the FB /tools/debug URL. Not ideal.
We can't publish the blog early, as often the info is sensitive and we don't want something leaking out. Is there any way to either force a FB rescrape when a blog is published OR can I set up the FB share with the right data in advance, despite the page being "Access Denied"?
Note: I tried the obvious, which is to publish the blog for a few seconds, scrape the right info, then unpublish. That works, but we end up with the blog live in the system longer than we want because of extensive load caching. It's not practical to do this each time we post a blog.
I don't have any code to add here because this is a process question, but I'm hoping there's some code I can ADD to the page, something that will "ping" the FB rescrape when the blog switches from unpublished to live.
Thank you in advance for any help.
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I will try to explain this to see if anyone could have a clue. We cant figure out the problem since months and it is driving me crazy.
We have a site with a custom CMS developed. We use Varnish to cache articles. If you're not logged in, you should see the cached article by Varnish. If you're logged in, you should see the live article.
We have a feature to program the publishing of the article. So, maybe we write an article, and set to publish tomorrow at 9am. When is published, a cached version of the article is created by Varnish.
The problem is that after the article is published, Facebook (we dont understand why) is saving the 404 Open Graph data. It is like Facebook cant reach the cached article, or maybe is trying to access it before the cached version is created (maybe beacuse we added the Facebook Comments plugin and it is calling Facebook to retrieve the comments of the URL that is not still cached?)
I'm not sure if the problem is clear, but we are really lost and can't fix it. All the scheduling script is uselss if once the article is published, no one can share it on Facebook because it has the wrong Open Graph data (from the 404)
I have recently been looking into adding Facebook Insights into one of our client's websites (www.mcvuk.com). I've created an app to associate with this and added the necessary Facebook meta tags to my site which reference the app id.
I was, until today, having issues adding the app domain information to https://developers.facebook.com/apps but have added this information in today.
My question is how long does it take before you will start to see results filter through for the site and is there any way of checking that everything has been set up correctly?
It might not be a matter of time, it might be a matter of how many 'likes' the app or page has. At least for pages, it tells you "Once 30 people like your Page, you'll get access to insights about your activity."
That's an interesting point.
It all depends on which metrics (results) you're after and how much traffic your app gets.
Additionally, you might want to look at facebook documentation for the metrics (results) you're looking for -- some of them are available monthly or weekly, others are a lifetime aggregate, and some are daily.
The easiest way to test would be to ask some of your friends to do whatever it is you want to test (comment on a post, link to a page, etc.).
I hope that answers some of your questions.
I need a wordpress plugin to automatically post every article to a facebook fan page I own.
==old question==
In my wordpress blog I'd like a "subscribe with facebook" button that lets a user subscribe to my posts, so that they appear on their profile on facebook (something like an RSS subscription..)
Is there anything like this? How could I do something similar in wordpress easily?
Maybe we could find a way to automatically post new articles to a facebook fan page, and then users could easily subscribe to that fan page. Is it possible?
All of what you describe is technically possible, although you do run a risk of running afoul of Facebook Platform Policy violations which will get your app shut down by Facebook.
The approach of posting to a fan page is much safer from a policy perspective.
I recommend a close reading of the Platform Policies section IV at https://developers.facebook.com/policy/
To post to the wall you will need the offline_access and publish_stream extended permissions.
I do not know if there is a WordPress plugin for this already or if you need to whip one up yourself.
You ask if there is anything like this, and RSS Graffiti seems to be what you are looking for.
If you want to roll your own, you can write to your Page feed using the Graph API. It is more work than it seems at first though, as you have to keep the oauth token updated (it can change even if it is long lasting, for example when you change your Facebook password), take care of getting correct permissions etc.
When my Facebook app posts to the users stream those posts do not get links for Like and Comment. Other Facebook publishing apps, like Instagram, get these links.
I can't find it in my Facebook application's settings. Anyone knows how to do it?
(I think this is the same question as this one: Facebook : Like and Comment Functionality against Wall Post but I'm not sure.)
See Traroth's comment to get a more to the point description of what it is I'm asking about.
It seems Nathat Totten is right about how these links are defaults and that they are controlled by Facebook. There are three things that confuses this issue.
One is that Facebook Test Users behave a bit more special than you might think. Even when they are friends, they are not fully so. Making these default links turn up only for the user that posts them (for Test Users, mind you, I'm hoping it'll work all right for real users).
Another is the documentation for actions in the Facebook Graph API documentation for publishing Post objects:
A list of available actions on the post (including commenting, liking, and an optional app-specified action). read_stream. A list of JSON objects containing the 'name' and 'link'.
Which made me start to try find out how to include the commenting and liking links myself. I can't find this info anywhere, so maybe that changed without the above quoted documentation reflecting the change.
Anyway, if, indeed this is a Test User issue, then I don't need to do anything special to fix this. I'll try to remember to come back here when my (iPhone) app is ready for the real Facebook world and I get to see if it works in that environment or not.
With the Facebook API are only recent things (wall posts, friends status updates etc) obtainable or is everything ever associated with the user's account obtainable?
That's a tricky question.
First nowhere in the official documentation says how many items you can get from Graph API nor FQL.
Not only this. Also when trying to do normal recently querys you may find out that not every result is returnes. Nor from the Graph API, FQL, not even from the FQL Test Console.
All this is because serious bugs in the Facebook Platform.
On october 15 Facebook said in its blog
We have received a great deal of feedback recently about things we should do to improve Facebook Platform. The themes are clear: “fix the bugs,” “update the documentation,” “talk to us more,” and “make things more reliable.” We are listening, and this post outlines some of the things we are doing to address your concerns.
This means that they are now fixing the bugs that has been accumulated on many months in Facebook Bug Tracker.
One of the open Bugs in there says:
When using a FQL Query or utilizing the new Graph API to grab posts on a users
stream, not all posts are returned.
From what I can see, the system will grab the latest posts from within the last
month, and then becomes extremely spotty after that. I am able to grab posts
from myself up to 4/24/2010, at which point every single wall post I have
posted seems to disappear.
Many other developers have states the same thing under the comments of this Bug.
On 2010-09-27 Jeff Bowen (Developer from facebook) said the following
Hi all, we still need to add this to the documentation but the stream table is
limited the last 30 days or 50 posts, whichever is greater. Sorry this wasn't
previously published.
This have made many people upset since they assumed you could get everything from the Graph API.
Anyway this is for multiple results. If you want a single result apperently (from the commnets in thts bug) You could go as far as June 15 2009
Personally, I haven't tested yet again so I don't know if this actully works the way they say. Facebook Graph API is in constant change. It has been incomplete and buggy since the begining. But now Facebook says they are working on that.
I recommend every facebook developer to sign up for the Facebook Platform bug tracking system since there is a lot of not official things about facebook, that will impact your applications.
I'll keep an eye on there to see if more is said on this topic and update this answer if needed