According to Tweet Button documentation (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-button/faq#count-api-increment) posted article must be accessible with HTTP response code 200, to allow Twitter counting your articles.
Current set up of our website is this:
1. article URL has following link: /post/:date/:title
2. link which is shared via Twitter is: /:date/:title (I don't know why - I didn't design it)
3. when someone is accessing the second link, backend code is performing 301 redirect to the first link
To fix Tweets counting I need to serve response code 200 with JS script code to perform redirect(e.g. window.location = '...'). But it will break 301 redirects for Google bot crawling the website, which is something we want to avoid (SEO reasons).
So the only solution I see is to leave 301 redirect, and serve different one only to Twitter, when it's trying to curl my website.
But how to do it?
I've just found a solution to my problem.
According to Twitter docs (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/getting-started#crawling) Twitter is using Twitterbot user agent, and basing on this I write following snippet of code:
if( strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Twitterbot') !== false ) { // for twitter counting
echo('<script type="text/javascript">window.location = "/post/:date/:title"</script>');
die;
}
else {
header('Location: /post/:date/:title', true, 301);
die;
}
Hope it helps someone in the future.
Related
I need to link to a specific page in my Facebook app. The app is not in a page tab, and cannot be in one due to the project constrictions.
This is the url format:
https://apps.facebook.com/myappname
I would need to pass a parameter at the end (like /next.html or ?page=next) so that I can link to the specific page directly from outside the app (from an email).
How would I set this up? My project uses PHP and jQuery. I would love to be able to do this strictly in Javascript if possible.
I have found tons of info on how to deep link a page tab or a mobile app, but not to a regular application. I have found messages stating it's possible, but nothing about how to actually do it anywhere online or on Facebook.
Thanks for your help.
EDIT:
Okay, I got it working in PHP. For anyone else with this issue, this is what I did.
Add a "?" at the very end of the 'Site URL' in your FB app, then create a redirect file similar to this as your app landing page (just use absolute paths instead of relative ones like I did below):
<?php
$query = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$params = explode("/", $query);
if (in_array("gallery", $params)) {
header("Location: /gallery.html");
exit;
}
else {
header("Location: /index.html");
exit;
}
?>
This answer is what helped me figure this out:
$_GET on facebook iframe app
I may be missing something here, but why don't you just link to http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/something.php - this should automatically load your canvas URL, with something.php appended to the path
Obviously this won't work if your canvas URL points to a specific file and not a directory, but plenty of apps do this with success
When you are using the ? all you are doing is issuing a $_GET request, so all of the info you require will exist in the $_GET array.
Rather than query the $_SERVER array, query the $_GET array.
So if you had:
http://myurl.com?info=foobar
You can simply access that info using:
$info = $_GET['info'];
It is good practice to check for the existence first though:
if (isset($_GET['info']))
{
$info =$_GET['info'];
}
else
{
$info="default";
}
Incidently if you use the & character you can have multiple parameters:
http://myurl.com?info=foo&moreinfo=bar
You get a special parameter called app_data that you can use however you want. I've used it in the past to encode a full querystring of my internal app. for example, &app_data=My/Custom/Page
More found in this SO question: Retrieve Parameter From Page Tab URL
Im new to this and im trying to rewrite URL so that utm_expid is hidden so if my url is:
http://www.myweb.com/?utm_expid=67183125-2
how would i make it so when user visits
myweb.com
it does not show utm_expid in url
Is this possible using PHP/JS?
NOTE: i cant use RUBY or any other languages except PHP/JS/HTML
There is a way. Just redirect the page to base url once the utm_expid=67183125-2 is got. ie,
if($_GET['utm_expid']) { //header to redirect to myweb.com }
Its a tricky way. Hope you are permitted to use it.
Just start a session and store value in session variable. you can regain it even page is re directed.
ie
<?php
session_start();
if($_GET['utm_expid']) {
$_SESSION['variable_name']=$_GET['utm_expid']
//header to redirect to myweb.com
}
?>
Let me add this Javascript trick that is server agnostic.
if (location.search.indexOf('utm_expid') > -1) {
history.replaceState('page', 'Title', '/')
}
I recommend you to place it at the end of the body.
If you wanted a clean URL (as you do for branding and manual sharing purposes), I'd script it so that you load a full page iFrame which loads the gA test queried URL. That way the user see s the clean URL in the address bar and still see the experiment.
You could use PHP to set up your index page (or any server side, or even client side script).
I have made a facebook application
I have uploaded all my code on my server, so facebook can retrieve it from there.
All my code is in HTML, php and javascript.
When the user visits www.mywebsite.com/facebook/app they will go to my index.php file.
But if the user types in www.mywebsite.com/facebook/app/pictures/picture.jpg he will see the picture.
Now I want to make sure, this content only can be access through facebook.
So I want to redirect everybody who tries to enter www.mywebsite.com/facebook/app/..../ to my facebook application www.facebook.com/myapp
Is there any way to do this?
Thank you
While it is very unreliable you could use the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] variable in php to see if the user typed in the url directly in their browser. It will be empty if the user has typed in the url directly, but i believe it should be set if your page is embedded through facebook.
see http://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-http-referer-variable/ for more info
How I fixed it
// Saves the original URL
$Origin_URL = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
// The original URL must also contain the word facebook
$face = "facebook";
// Checks if the URL contains 'facebook'
$contains = strpos($Origin_URL,$face);
// If the original url is empty or doesn't contain facebook
// the user will be redirected to the facebook site
if(Origin_URL == "" || $contains === false)
header("Location: www.facebook.com/website");
This is not bulletproof, so try toy with it a little :)
I want to make a count of visits to my website from referal websites. I know there are many programs such as Google analytics but there will show you that my taffic is coming from www.facebook.com for example. I want to check if the traffic is coming from some specific urls that I specify such as www.facebook.com/myfanpage.
Befor I think about php I tried several methods with javascript that they did not seem to function the way I wanted to. For my search for php I only found this function. Any Ideas ?
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] Will do exactly what you need.
if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 'facebook.com') !== false) {
// Facebook brought me to this page.
}
elseif (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 'google.com') !== false ) {
// Google brought me to this page.
}
Sorry, I know this is 6 months late but surely if the url was http://mydomain.com/?p=facebook.com then this would also be true? a better way would be to explode the referrers url based on / then extract the 4th section i.e.
$refererUrl = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$Exploded_URL = explode("/",$refererUrl);
$urlToCheck = $Exploded_URL[3].'.'.$Exploded_URL[4];
if($urlToCheck == 'facebook.com'){
/* From Facebook */
} elseif ($urlToCheck == 'google.com'){
/* From Google */
}
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] should contain the URL that the user is coming from to get to your page. It's not a function. It's simply a value. So you can use it for this purpose.
Do note, however, that the value is easily spoofed. (It's taken from the HTTP request header, and the user can send whatever they want.) It should be acceptably reliable if you're just collecting stats for your own interest or whatever. But if you're trying to use it to secure the page (e.g., only show certain content if the visitor came from a certain URL), forget it.
You will be able to check only if the HTTP Request has referer which is actually accessible in PHP using HTTP_REFERER. So its solely responsible from the referring website.
Get original URL referer with PHP?
The above post also will help you.
I'm creating a PHP CMS and have some system pages like a 404 page, a maintenance page, and an unauthorized access page. When Page A isn't found, the CMS will redirect to the 404 page; if the user doesn't have access to Page B, it will redirect to the unauthorized access page, etc.
I'd like to use the proper status code in the header of each page, but I need clarification on how to handle the header/redirect. Do I put the 404 header on Page A and then redirect to the 404 page or do I put the 404 status on the 404 page itself? Also, if the latter is the correct answer, what kind of redirect should I use to get there, a 301 or a 302?
If a user arrives on page A and that page doesn't exist, then do not redirect : just send a 404 error code from page A -- and, to be nice for your user, an HTML content indicating that the page doesn't exist.
This way, the browser (and it's even more true for crawlers ! ) will know that the page that is not found is page A, and not anything else you'd have tried to redirect to.
Same for other kind of errors, btw : if a specific URL corresponds to an error, then, the error code should be sent from that URL.
Basically, something as simple as this should be enough :
if (page not found) {
header("404 Not Found");
echo "some nice message that says the page doesn't exist";
die;
}
(Well, you could output something nicer, of course ; but you get the idea ;-) )
I'm not sure if the redirecting is the best way for doing this. Id rather use some built in functionality that is included into the project.
If the data is not found, do not redirect the user to another page, just send him an error message, like Hey, this site does not exists! Try an other one and so.
And not at the end, you should build into the code, the code-part from the answer of Pascal Martin.
I would do this into a function, and call it from a bootstrap or something with a similar behavior.
function show_error($type="404", $header = true, $die = false)
{
if($header)
header("404 Not Found");
echo file_get_contents($type.'.php');
if($die) die; //
// and so on...
}