PHP & Facebook: facebook-debug a URL using CURL and Facebook debugger - php

Question

Facts: I run a simple website that contains articles, articles dynamically acquired by scraping third-party websites/blogs etc (new articles arrive to my website every half an hour or so), articles which I wish to post on my facebook page. Each article typically includes an image, a title and some text.
Problem: Most (almost all) of the articles that I post on Facebook are not posted correctly - their images are missing.
Inefficient Solution: Using Facebook's debugger (this one) I submit an article's URL to it (URL from my website, not the original source's URL) and Facebook then scans/scrapes the URL and correctly extracts the needed information (image, title, text etc). After this action, the article can be posted on Facebook correctly - no missing images or anything.
Goal: What I am after is a way to create a process which will submit a URL to Facebook's debugger, thus forcing Facebook to scan/scrape the URL so that it can then be posted correctly. I believe that what I need to do is to create an HTML POST request containing the URL and submit it to Facebook's debugger. Is this the correct way to go? And if yes, as I have no previous experience with CURL, what is the correct way to do it using CURL in PHP?
Side Notes: As a side note, I should mention that I am using short URLs for my articles, although I do not think that this is the cause of the problem because the problem persists even when I use the canonical URLs.
Also, the Open Graph meta tags are correctly set (og:image, og:description, etc).

Answer 1

You can debug a graph object using Facebook graph API with PHP-cURL, by doing a POST to
https://graph.facebook.com/v1.0/?id={Object_URL}&scrape=1
to make thing easier, we can wrap our debugger within a function:
function facebookDebugger($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://graph.facebook.com/v1.0/?id='. urlencode($url). '&scrape=1');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$r = curl_exec($ch);
return $r;
}
though this will update & clear Facebook cache for the passed URL, it's a bit hard to print out each key & its content and avoid errors in the same time, however I recommended using var_dump() or print_r() OR PHP-ref
usage with PHP-ref
r( facebookDebugger('http://retrogramexplore.tumblr.com/') );