Thread

This is an archived forum and the content is probably no longer relevant, but is provided here for posterity.

The active forums are here.

Facebook not seeing meta and <img>

September 14, 2010 2:59pm

Subscribe [2]

#1 / Sep 14, 2010 2:59pm

Jarred
14 posts

Hello.

When sharing a blog entry on Facebook, I am no longer getting thumbnails and the page description, just a generic link.

This used to work, I don’t know when it stopped (haven’t updated the blog in about 4 months until this week). But as a photographer, it’s definitely a bummer.

http://www.inluxphoto.com/blog/

If you click the ‘Share on Facebook’ button in any individual entry, you get the same result as pasting a link into the status update field, or attaching the link to a status update - a generic link, with no images or metadata.

Anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Any help would be great!
#2 / Sep 15, 2010 2:57pm

hd
156 posts

First off I noticed an error: Failed to load resource - fan.php
(probably not related, but thought it might be pertinent)

There are several things that can cause this…

Page headers must be 200 OK:
(this isn’t a problem on your pages it seems)

Sometimes a bad doctype can cause it:
Try changing your doctype to read <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

For the images to show it helps to explicitly declare them in the head along with the other meta tags:
<link rel=“image_src” href=“http://mydomain.com/thumbnail.jpg” />

For testing:
Use this page to test http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php, and note that Facebook caches these results. To make sure that it re-pulls the meta data when you are testing, add a random GET to your url: http://mydomain.com/page_to_share?fb=98424276
#3 / Sep 17, 2010 1:14pm

ajlny
42 posts

As mentioned in the above post, make sure you’re providing as much of Facebook’s required meta as you can. Facebook does cache, and it often fails. I’ve run into issues in the past where FB just does not parse the page correctly (and the behavior occurred on other high profile sites).
#4 / Sep 21, 2010 1:59pm

Jarred
14 posts

Thanks for the information, I appreciate your time. I’ve tried the above suggestions and I haven’t had any luck. I haven’t given up yet.

I’m not entirely sure how to force Facebook to ignore its cache and pull fresh info from the page. You said to add a GET, could you explain how that is done? I would like to know so I can continue testing.

Thanks for your help!
#5 / Sep 21, 2010 2:43pm

hd
156 posts

I mean by adding a GET:
http://yoursite.com/your_page_to_test?random=34

usually adding ?random=34 (with a different number chose) will defeat the Facebook caching.
#6 / Sep 21, 2010 3:21pm

Jarred
14 posts

Ok I just spent two hours trying to fix this and it’s just not working on any EE powered page. Every page on the same domain outside of the EE system, some with much less/worse metadata, are working fine. This has to have something to do with EE and how Facebook sees the page. This is becoming quite the frustration. I am still on 1.6.8, would that have anything to do with it?
#7 / Sep 21, 2010 3:58pm

Jarred
14 posts

Ok, there is a pretty big thread on this on the Facebook Developers forum. Seems like it’s a problem for a lot of people, despite Facebook’s claim that it is fixed. Annoying.
#8 / Sep 21, 2010 4:17pm

Jarred
14 posts

As of a few minutes ago, Facebook reopened the ticket in their bug tacker. Maybe this will get fixed!