Identical Resources Loaded Multiple Times by Facebook Social Plugins - facebook

I've run a Pingdom.com test on my page and found out that identical JS files from Facebook are being loaded twice. Once from http://s-static.ak.facebook.com/ and another time from http://static.ak.fbcdn.net. Pingdom is reporting that the page size is 753.7kB. That's a lot, and if you exclude Facebook resources, the page size goes down more than 60%—what a waste! Is there any way to mitigate this problem? Thanks!

You may need to use a channel file:
The channelUrl parameter is optional, but recommended. Providing a
channel file can help address three specific known issues. First,
pages that include code to communicate across frames may cause Social
Plugins to show up as blank without a channelUrl. Second, if no
channelUrl is provided and a page includes auto-playing audio or
video, the user may hear two streams of audio because the page has
been loaded a second time in the background for cross domain
communication. Third, a channel file will prevent inclusion of extra
hits in your server-side logs. If you do not specify a channelUrl, you
can remove page views containing fb_xd_bust or fb_xd_fragment
parameters from your logs to ensure proper counts.
The channelUrl must be a fully qualified URL matching the page on
which you include the SDK. In other words, the channel file domain
must include www if your site is served using www, and if you modify
document.domain on your page you must make the same document.domain
change in the channel.html file as well. The protocols must also
match. If your page is served over https, your channelUrl must also be
https. Remember to use the matching protocol for the script src as
well. The sample code above uses protocol-relative URLs which should
handle most https cases properly.

Related

Is it possible to add adverts to a custom Facebook Page Tab app?

I need to create a custom Facebook Page Tab app which will show an external site in an iframe. This need to have adverts on it but I'm not sure if this is possible as the site is hosted externally.
I'm not sure if I need to sign up to the Facebook Audience Network to get approved etc. either?
Any help or advice would be great.
Many browsers have this limitation of not allowing external sites to be shown in an iframe. Imagine the case when you are working hard to create a site and others show all your content in iframes. That is, naturally frustrating.
However, there is a candidate-solution: Let's suppose you create a page which sends a request to the other site and appends all the content into the body and head of your page. This is very much possible, so the solution is to:
Create a page in your site, let's call it outsider
In the server-side code of your outsider page send a request to the desired page to be shown
You will get the html of the page. Process it and include its content into the head and body of outsider. This includes:
3.1. Checking all the CSS to be reached, as the target page might refer to local CSS, which is unreachable locally at your end. Process the URLs of CSS files
3.2. Checking all the Javascript to be reached, as the target page might refer to local JS, which is unreachable locally at your end. Process the URLs of JS files
3.3. Apply the idea described in 3.1. and 3.2. for other resources, like images, until you are satisfied with the content of outsider
Create an iframe, having the source to point to outsider. outsider is inside your scope, so it should be shown
NOTE: If the site owning the target page does not like the possibility of you showing their content inside iframes, they might protect it by, let's say, having Javascript in their code, which checks whether the page is inside an iframe. Remove that code while processing the response to your request. If nothing else prevents you from showing the page in an iframe, then you should achieve success.

When to use "Follow Redirects" & "Redirect Automatically" while recording with jmeter.

I want to know the difference between Follow Redirects and Redirect Automatically while recording with Jmeter.
Also what effect will both these have when used with Retrieve all Embedded Resources from HTML
Redirect automatically, will not consider redirect as a separate request
where as Follow redirects will consider each redirection as a separate request.
This difference can be visualized in the Listener (View Results Tree).
If Retrieve all Embedded Resources from HTML is checked, it will give you Page Load Time, since apart from response time it will keep on calculating the time taken till all the supporting files of html page have been downloaded to Local (CSS, Images, Javascript files.. etc.)
Also if any values needs to be captured from redirect request you need to set configuration a follow redirect otherwise will not be able to capture those data using extractors (set cookie values for example)
Hope this will help.

Where, exactly channel url is used?

On what browsers or user agents that channel URL is actually used, and what for?
I have no intention of having my site to work on Internet Explorer <= 8 (it is an HTML5 <canvas> game, and I am serving everything else as "application/xhtml+xml").
So, if channel is only useful on that old crap, I can gladly get rid of it...
Related (possibly): Channel URL Facebook
Because the social plugin is cross domain call, it needs a way to communicate. The wrokaround is to include a hidden iframe in the page for that. But, with this workaround, that iframe is loaded every time when page loads and will double the traffic reported. This is why channel url was done. What it does, it load the fb js in that page, and from that moment on, the js is available on your domain.
It will improve your loading times (cache) and will fix the reporting issue (you will see in reports channel page reported separately). But is not necessary for any html5 capable browser.
So, if you are using only HTML5 capable browsers, you are safe to ignore that. I am not sure about ie9, I will try to test it with my app by removing channel url and let you know.
Edit: By removing the channel URL from my app, I start getting double traffic reports from IE9. I think that is a good idea to keep the file there, is is just a simple html file with a single line. Better to be safe than sorry.

facebook iframe app - how to organize and write code for faster page loading - PHP SDK

I am writing an app within a facebook iframe and am unsure how best to write this. I originally wrote all the code within the main canvas.php file but found everything was running too slow before results were being loaded into the iframe.
I then tried using the php header location method so to try and load different pages into the iframe, thus reducing page load time. However, the header location is ignored.
I have also tried using javascript to get the page to load within the iframe instead, this does load in the new page but the page experiences lots of problems. It wil not pass parrameteres to itself using $_GET.
Basically, I need to perform some checks when the canvas page is first loaded in the iframe and then re-direct to another file to avoid the checks being perfomed on every page load as this seriously shows everything down. I then need to have page reloads with different parrameteres in the URL to populate the iframe with different results, again this is very slow as it has to perfomr all the checks again.
Therefore, how can I achieve a smooth workflow as a normal site within a facebook iframe?
[EDIT] Just thought is Ajax a valid option?
Many thanks in advance.
Most people experience slow response times due to not having a channelURL specified. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/
Channel File
The channel file addresses some issues with cross domain communication
in certain browsers. The contents of the channel.html file can be just
a single line:
It is important for the channel file to be cached for as long as
possible. When serving this file, you must send valid Expires headers
with a long expiration period. This will ensure the channel file is
cached by the browser which is important for a smooth user experience.
Without proper caching, cross domain communication will become very
slow and users will suffer a severely degraded experience. A simple
way to do this in PHP is:
The channelUrl parameter is optional, but recommended. Providing a
channel file can help address three specific known issues. First,
pages that include code to communicate across frames may cause Social
Plugins to show up as blank without a channelUrl. Second, if no
channelUrl is provided and a page includes auto-playing audio or
video, the user may hear two streams of audio because the page has
been loaded a second time in the background for cross domain
communication. Third, a channel file will prevent inclusion of extra
hits in your server-side logs. If you do not specify a channelUrl, you
can remove page views containing fb_xd_bust or fb_xd_fragment
parameters from your logs to ensure proper counts.
The channelUrl must be a fully qualified URL matching the page on
which you include the SDK. In other words, the channel file domain
must include www if your site is served using www, and if you modify
document.domain on your page you must make the same document.domain
change in the channel.html file as well. The protocols must also
match. If your page is served over https, your channelUrl must also be
https. Remember to use the matching protocol for the script src as
well. The sample code above uses protocol-relative URLs which should
handle most https cases properly.

webkit .appcache file caches dynamic page

The main page of my mobile web app is a .jsp page. My app requires login (Google App Engine), so there is a Log In button when the user is not logged in and a Log Out button when the user is logged in, all handled by code on the .jsp page.
I load a lot of JS code on the page, so I used a .appcache file to cache that. Unfortunatelly, even though I added my .jsp page to the Network area, the page is being cached in a funny way, ignoring the content server from the server. That means that my Log Out button shows when users are Logged Out and vice-versa.
I tried to add no-cache directives as meta tags, but they are all being ignored.
Ideas?
According to dive into HTML5, the page that references the manifest is automatically included in the manifest.
http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/offline.html
Q: Do I need to list my HTML pages in my cache manifest?
A: Yes and no. If your entire web application is contained in a single page, just make sure that page points to the cache manifest using the manifest attribute. When you navigate to an HTML page with a manifest attribute, the page itself is assumed to be part of the web application, so you don’t need to list it in the manifest file itself. However, if your web application spans multiple pages, you should list all of the HTML pages in the manifest file, otherwise the browser would not know that there are other HTML pages that need to be downloaded and cached.
I have a similar issue, and I think I will end up loading the contents of the page via AJAX.
Caching in appCache is a two stage process: first the cache manifest is checked (in this case, as the page is loading), then if the content of it has changed, that content is reloaded. However, in your case, by that time, the stale page is already loaded and displayed.
The easiest fix would be to specifically exclude the page (but not the .js) from the appCache, so that only the js is cached, and not the page. I sounds like you might have figured that out, as you are trying to do it by putting the page in the network area. Check that that exclusion is correct, as that sounds like the problem, and that html cache attributes are being set correctly on that page.