How to make a loading gif for facebook tab iframe app - facebook

Q1. It seems facebook is killing all animated gif's is this true?
If someone has figured out how to display loading gifs on facebook apps, please tell me what the best way to do the following is:
I have a UK-based server serving an iframe in a facebook tab. It takes ages for the page to load because facebook is pulling the page from its servers in US.
My idea is to serve a free-ly hosted, fast loading page that loads the facebook loading gif and loads my iframe from the UK in the background. Once the iframe is loaded, the onload() event will fire and remove the loading gif... pretty standard.
Q2. Will this work?
Q3. If so what free hosted servers are peered with facebook's servers?
Cheers.

Update the Facebook app setting to point to a page on your local servers that loads quickly that will do two things. Display a GIF, and also redirect to the slower servers using JavaScript. That way the user will see the GIF until the browser can render the new page. No need to change Facebook or it's servers. :)

Related

Facebook iFrame App Will Not Display

I have searched through many pages on SO and cannot seem to find the answer I am looking for.
I have a website (created via CMS SiteCore) that I want to display via an iFrame on a Facebook page. however, due to some SSL issue (I still do not fully understand the issue, but I know it is related to SSL), Facebook will not display it.
I thought a possible solution would be dwonlaoding all of the content (HTML, CSS, Images, etc) and just recreate it in an HTML editor app for Facebook. Wrongo. The app does not let me upload images, and when I link to the images on my server, it hits this SSL issue again and will not display images.
I just want this page to display when clicking on the app. Here is the page:
http://www.pplweb.com/home/social/facebook/pplcareers/v2/careers_fb_v2_hj.ashx
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Yep you require a SSL Certificate can get them as low as $17 in Geotrust if need be or a dearer one in hostgator or godaddy as well and they will install it for if have them as a host... once attached to domain should show the site or webpage in FB within Iframes... Also as the previous poster need to have domains the same one using the iframes in FB as that is where you want it right displayed...
Hope helps
Rick Ling

Differentiating between Google Analytics Tracking of Facebook App and Web App

I have a web app at www.mydomain.com/webapp and its set up with Google Analytics. I create a facebook app at apps.facebook.com/webapp and iframe in the above url.
Is there a way to distinguish activity of users on facebook from users on mydomain?
Thanks for any help and direction you can give me.
You could use JavaScript to determine that your page is displayed in an iframe – but that would also be true if maybe other sites embedded your page.
A better way would be to check for the [signed_request][1] parameter that gets POSTed to your app on initial load into the iframe. (If you were paranoid about someone “faking” that, you could also verify the signed_request.)
Once you figured out that your page was actually loaded inside Facebook, it should be easy to execute the appropriate JS code to send that info to Analytics.

facebook share link wont show image from my server

I am trying to share a from my site on facebook
and it just wont display the image.
I tried the debug tool
and it says that every thing is ok...
the most wired thing is that when I put the same page on a different server it works fine!!!
and how can I clear the facebook cache ?
thanks alot
Check to make sure that there is not a setting on your server preventing Facebook from programmatically scraping the image data. I have recently run across this issue where the settings on a server were restrictively secure to the extent where Facebook was not able to grab the image data for sharing purposes and make a copy of the image into its CDN.

Iframes v FBML - Why transfer?

I have lots of Facebook Fanpages, and I have been told on many occasions to change to iFrames. Facebook developing isn't really my main thing so I havent kept upto date with the change as FBML worked for me.
I have asked a recent question about rotating images and it seems that iFrames will be able to handle this.
Can you tell me what are the good things about iFrames?
Is there an iFrame service without thirdpart branding (i.e WildFire logo at the bottom of page)
Thanks for your help
You should be switching as soon as possible from fbml fan pages to iframe fan page because the FBML pages have been deprecated (you can't create new fbml pages) and it is likely Facebook will start killing FBML page support for existing pages, with little to no notice.
The biggest benefits are almost all javascript code will run now and without making a user first click somewhere. Laying out pages is a lot cleaner. And you don't have to learn the fbml tags. You just make a web page like you normally would and it should run just fine, as long as you understand that iframe code is sandboxed due to cross domain limitations so you can't try to modify its parent (the Facebook page)
I don't know of any iFrame services, but iFrame pages are so simple - you just host a plain html file or webpage somewhere on a server anywhere and tell Facebook the url for it. Do note though that the site it is hosted on should have an SSL certificate for users that visit your page with HTTPS enabled on their Facebook account.

Facebook app canvas fbml loading blank page

I developed a facebook app with fbml canvas.
Sometimes for me it loads a blank page (say 1/10 times). For a user in another location it is always loading blank page.
Is it a problem with facebook or my hosting?
Please help me out to resolve this problem.
Thanks in advance.
It most likely is on the facebook site. If it was a fault on your side, it would always have come as blank. Sometimes facebook servers go down, and you see blank pages. I have developed a number of facebook applications and unfortunately this problem happens with those apps just as well. So don't worry, it is there with the facebook itself.