My site has a feed system and when user clicks on any one of those feed snippets (the object), I want the action to be publish in their Facebook news feed. So I'm really confused on how to go about it because as far as I'm aware this is how you post actions on Facebook's JavaScript SDK:
FB.api('/me/namespace:action?object=url','post')
How do you dynamically change the properties of the object? Are there parameters you can send? As far as I'm concerned, Facebook asks you to give pass a URL and it'll grab the <meta> information from that URL?
Am I supposed to perform a GET request with my own server and change the meta tags dynamically. This sounds like more work than it needs to be. For example, what if the feed includes a paragraph of text, it'll be impractical for me to post that as a get request and then urldecode the entire thing.
I'm not sure I totally understand your question, but...
You can dynamically change the tags for facebook og: properties, but you have to do it before the page loads (e.g. using PHP as opposed to javascript). After you send the post using the javascript SDK, facebook crawls the page and looks for the info in the og: meta tags.
Related
According to my testing, Facebook's crawlers do not render client-side templates like a browser.
I want to avoid a webserver and building HTML files for Open Graph objects at all costs. I want to generate the meta tags on the fly via the URL, but it seems Facebook cannot do this.
Can someone from Facebook please confirm? I asked the head of Open Graph at #mobiledevcon and she said that Facebook can render stuff like {{value}}
My meta tags are as follows, and they render fine in every browser. But the Facebook Open Graph Debugger only sees the raw text, not the interpolated content.
<meta property="{{meta.property}}" content="{{meta.content}}">
When you think about it it should be clear, why this does not work.
The Facebook crawler downloads the HTML as it is served by the server. The Facebook crawler will not execute any JavaScript, like all the crawler will not execute the JavaScript. This is due to security restrictions and for speed reason (they do not have the time execute JavaScript on their servers.)
There is no way around this. If you want the crawler to index you page, you need to give them directly what you want them to read.
Tip: You could use something like phantom.js to render your pages on the server side and serve this to the crawlers.
The solution is basically to use some kind of server-side user-agent detection to pick up whenever a social media crawler arrives.
Use the ?_escaped_fragment_ method along with a prerender service. Facebook will respect the same crawlable Ajax specification as Google. Please see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification
I would like to add a Facebook Like button inside my software.
I know how to programmatically do the actual liking process,
but how do I check and see if a person actually has liked my page?
Edit: I'm guessing that my software also has got to communicate with an actual Facebook App
that I have to develop, and not Only with a regular facebook html source?
Have you considered dropping a TWebControl on your Delphi form, assigning a simple HTML document string to it that contains the markup needed for a Facebook like button and making it just large enough to display your facebook like button content?
The like count and user liked state would be handled automatically by the javascript dynamically loaded into the html page. The javascript written by Facebook.
Seems like a full-functionality, least-effort approach worth considering.
I don't have Facebook to test this, but try to use what is described in this blog post; try to use the following HTTP GET request and in the response (after you parse it), find the user you're looking for:
https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes/PAGE_ID&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN
Where PAGE_ID should be your page ID and ACCESS_TOKEN your access token.
For a simple GET request you can use e.g. this code.
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=
We're running a canvas app that has fully localized og tags. Everything is working well except when users choose to manually copy the facebook app url (apps.facebook.com/mysite) into a post.
When that happens, we want the text in the posted message to be in the user's language. Instead, it's always uses the English text from the og: meta tags.
If I could detect which culture the user came from, I could change those meta tags. However I don't see anything in the request header or parameters that are sent from the scraper to indicate where the user is coming from.
I did see that there's an og:locale:alternate tag I could use to specify other languages the page is available in, but unless I get a second request from Facebook with a locale value I don't see how that benefits me.
How can I ensure the posted title/description is in the user's language?
Must it be done using the Localization section in the Facebook App settings?
If so, is there a way to automate it? Our translation workflow is pretty well established and I don't want to send translators into the facebook app to finish the job.
You most probably need some parameter in the querystring to differentiate the urls.
e.g
http://apps.facebook.com/my_app/en/
or
http://apps.facebook.com/my_app/it/
this parameter will actually set the active language on your app.
And facebook scraper will cache the localized title/ description from the meta tags.
We are working on a facebook-app with lots of dynamic pages. As the app is embedded in a tab on a facebook page, the urls contain a get-parameter to address the correct tab/app. We want to implement like- and send-buttons for several pages within our app, but facebook seems to dump all get-parameters from urls within facebook. As the result all like- and send-buttons point to the facebook-page itself instead of the tab.
Does anybody now any workaround? We already tried redirects via an external sefor facebook urls only.rver but facebook seems to evaluate the links on click of the like-/send-button (and seems to follow all sort of redirects).
UPDATE:
Here is an example of a problematic url:
https://www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de?sk=app_171502639574871
UPDATE:
The problem seems to be independant of url get-parameters. It seems that the like-button does not work with any url starting with www.facebook.com
When used in a like-button everything behind the ? will be dumped. This seems to happen for facebook urls only.
Best workaround so far is to point your like buttons at external (non-facebook canvas) urls.
To make this work, you need to do some conditional redirecting to get the user back into your canvas URL. You can either use a client side javascript redirect:
<script>
window.location = 'http://apps.facebook.com/yourcanvasname/foo/bar';
</script>
Or you can do a server side redirect based on the useragent string. Basically, if the useragent contains 'facebookexternalhit' then render a basic HTML page containing OG tags, if not, redirect to the canvas URL.
Doing this means the Facebook sharescraper/linter won't follow any redirects back to the canvas URL, but any user that arrives at your URL will get back to Canvas.
i'm too searching for a solution to control the custom page tab's content through a get parameter (app_data). I still don't have a solution but here at least the reason why all www.facebook.com links are srtiped out of get params. Here at bottom the developer explains why.
Unfortunately I don't think what you are trying to do is possible. Posting a like programmatically requires you to specify a Facebook content ID or alias. This won't work for you because tabs to not seem to have an exposed content ID of their own, and instead use the Page's content ID with an additional parameter which you can't use with the graph.
Liking external links and other content that does not have an ID programmatically is prohibited. With an external URL, the first like of an unrecognised URL creates a new Facebook page for those likes to be represented on (which is the issue I've given up trying to fight), but presumably the presence of your Page's content ID alias (www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de) in the url is making Facebook choose you page rather than creating a new one.
The only suggestion I can think of this late at night is to target an external URL that performs a redirect via Javascript, rather than on the server, but Facebook may be wise to that too and I'm afraid I'm going to bed rather than testing it :)