I know this question has been rised quite a lot of times, but then they constantly change things at Facebook and none of the numerous ways I've discovered on the web, works for me. Maybe it worked before, but not anymore.
I have a web page with a video playing in our skinned jwplayer. All the og tags are beautifully set, so that when a visitor likes the page, it's title, description, thumb and custom flash player are nicely shared on the users wall. Video even plays right there on the wall, in the embedded and customized flash player. So everything works as expected.
But!.. We would like to auto-post our new posts onto the website's page on Facebook and we want them to look exactly like when they are shared. One would probably expect that it'd be enough to simply post a link through PHP SDK and facebook will do the rest. But it doesn't. It seems to not pay attention at og tags in latter case.
What would be the right way to do this? Is it possible to force facebook to look at og tags? Or how to publish a post with a video in a similar way, but through PHP SDK?
One would probably expect that it'd be enough to simply post a link through PHP SDK and facebook will do the rest. But it doesn't.
What exactly are you posting – just a link, or a post containing a link?
(For difference between the two types of creating a feed object see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/#posts vs https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/#links)
Is it possible to force facebook to look at og tags?
Normally it does without any further action neccessary.
Have you tried, though, putting your new posts URL through Facebook debugger before posting it?
Related
I want to be able to post iframe on user's page, i.e. basically completely custom post with its own html markup and its own javascript. Something like when you post youtube/vimeo or coub video, they have their own players.
It seems to be possible just judging from the fact that there are apps exist which allow you to do it and there are also some guides on how to create "iframe app", but those guides seems to be pretty outdated.
I could not find anything about that in facebook docs. Canvas seems to be the closest one, but it's a page outside of user's timeline and I need it to be embedded in the timeline, like a post which can be shared, liked etc.
Any pointers to docs would be appreciated! Thanks!
Facebook seems to change things fast.. All existing questions I have seen are older than facebooks "big image" posts, that this question is (partially) related to.
I'm testing Facebook interaction by including meta tags in my page to add a YouTube player as og:video on a page on my site.
All OG tags validate and I can successfully post links and get the video embeded. The problem I get is that while both the Facebook OG Debug Tool and the post does understand the title and description of the page, the post seems to behave strangely when played compared to a youtube link.
Look at the differences here: http://imgur.com/a/kOvkk
I have tried all combinations and order of OG tags I can think of, but I cannot seem to get the same result from my page link as I get from the YouTube link. And since the Facebook Debugger Sees the exact same values, I can not see how they are interpreted so differently..?
Here is the OG Debugger Comparison: http://i.imgur.com/dqok8aG.png
Has anyone else experienced this, or is familiar with the inner workings of Facebook?
The pages used to test are these, although the one on my site might have changed when you read this.
Solved it! The behaviour is triggered by the size of the og-image, and even if I still cannot understand why the youtube link behaves differently with the exact same image url, I can workaround it by manually setting a smaller og:image.
Result: http://i.imgur.com/g5pIN2b.png
This is probably not possible, but I'm throwing it out here for anyone with crazy awesome ideas or if they happened to come across some morsel of information about it.
I have an embedded YouTube player (iFrame) using the API, with a custom JS control bar. All that works great.
I want to have a share option, however, since the videos on my site will often appear as overlays, it's not ideal to have the page be shared, but rather the video itself. Is there a way to have a user share the YouTube link directly from my page, rather than just a link to my site?
I already realize the fallback is to create a URL on my site that takes a video id parameter and redirects to the proper youtube page.
Doesn't the embed video from YouTube include all YouTube features by default?
(Thumbs up, share, full screen, etc…)
I have been reading about using Open Graph (OG) meta tags to improve the way facebook works with your website. I have read two tutorials that say to create an application and use the application ID. But I am not developing an application, all I have is a business page... Can I just the page ID?
Can anybody also point out any good, simple resources around the using OG in my website?
Thanks
The sharer.php method (which is deprecated) allows you to post without an application. The feed/post method appears to require an app_id, though it's possible that there's some way around that. On the bright side, there's nothing complex about creating an application, so, if that's what you must do, I'd say just do it :)
Here is an example of how it works *with an app using the feed/post method (you'll need to click the "Post to feed" link at the top (yes I know it doesn't look like a link!).
and Here is the same exact example only using Sharer (notice that this time it's pointing at a slightly different url (drawImageForFB2.php instead of drawImageForFB4.php).
I use a php to render the tags based on the vidId that I collect but that's neither here nor there... you could just as easily have this as a static HTML page.
The innards of the OG tag are just about identical and the app_id tag in the OG is entirely optional as it pertains to the second example).
Oh, and addthis does it using the dialog api which looks like this
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?redirect_uri=http://s7.addthis.com/static/postshare/c00.html&app_id=140586622674265&link=http://support.addthis.com/customer/portal/articles/381222-optimize-facebook-sharing#.UQ8bBJM9KQk.facebook&name=Optimize%20Facebook%20Sharing&description=
A little while ago, I built this:
http://www.littlebray.co.uk/photos.aspx
It's kind of an off-Facebook partial replica of a Facebook photo album gallery, the photos in the gallery section are all pulled from Facebook albums on the Page for Little Bray (fb.com/littlebray) enlarging them gives you a kinda full screen view of them with commenting facilties on the right margin, just like Facebook.
You'll notice that, whilst this comment section looks a bit like a Facebook plugin, it isn't, and the reason for this is that if I used Facebooks Comments Plugin, when a user comments on a photo on the website, or comments on the same photo (remembering the photos come from the same source), it will create two different streams of comments, one shown on FB and one shown on the website.
With my method, any comments posted either on the website or FB will appear in both places as they're al directly injected into the FB graph relating to the object ID of the photo.
A bit later on, I created another, similar image gallery but used Facebooks Social Plugin "Comments" in the right hand margin to comment on photos. The difference here though was that these photos were lcoally hosted by the website and not already Facebook album objects, so this other website is the only source for these images and thus creating FB objects when commenting via a URL is fine.
BUT... it got me thinking, is my first example just a lot of work, is it possible to use Facebooks own Social Plugin to post comments on an object which already exists on Facebook in that way?
I tried pasting a graph URL https://graph.facebook.com/FB_OBJECT_ID into the Comments example on Facebooks Social Plugins page from a status update of mine, but nothing showed.
Any ideas?
EDIT ---
I have discovered I am not alone in asking this question:
Using social plugins for pre-existing Facebook posts
Load comments from open graph object into Facebook comments social plugin
Neither of those have satisfactory answers though. Perhaps I just need to improve my own code and make my own plugin.
At this time the comments plugin can not be used in that way.