Facebook Like button stopped working suddenly - php

My fancy OpenGraph Facebook like button for my quotation mashup suddenly decided to stop working. It now says I provide an invalid url. The url is basically quotation?q=123 with 123 being the currently displayed quotation. They are usually generated randomly when someone arrives at the page.
All was fine, now it seems to be implying I can't have URLs like this, must I encode them? Or that I have meta tags that OpenGraph needs wrong or in the wrong place. It was odd that it suddenly started working, even the example from Facebook is showing the error:
Invalid URL
The requested URL "/plugins/like.php?
Did Facebook break?
I used some development tool they provide to get more info, which seems to baffle me even more as my meta tags are inside the head tag.
Debugging info from Facebook
Ideas, just wait to see if Facebook fixes itself?

Something must have been wrong with the mothership, as a day later give or take a few hours, my webpage (app) with the fanciest like button is working as expected again.
Quotation Mashup

Related

Twitter Sharing URL from personal site is not working as expected

I have a new website, which I've just uploaded my first blog post onto.
I have social sharing buttons on the page, but a few don't seem to work as expected.
In Twitter the URL doesn't appear at all. Its as if its ignored. Here's the twitter link:
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet/?url=http://www.andrewburns.info%2Fblog%2Ffirstsortedvalue+function+in+Qlikview+script.php&via=AndyBurns89
Facebook and Reddit work fine. Google plus cuts off the URL after the first space, even though i used urlencode on the link:
https://plus.google.com/share?url=www.andrewburns.info%2Fblog%2Ffirstsortedvalue+function+in+Qlikview+script.php
I tried posted the link directly into Twitter and it doesn't seem to recognise that its a webpage at all. It doesn't shorten the link down like it normally does.
Have a look at this https://dev.twitter.com/web/tweet-button/web-intent. Take a look at the query parameters and notice the http:%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2F

Facebook share for my site resulting in blank page

When I try to share any link on my site with facebook sharer.php, I get a blank page
I want to share
http://sportmenow.com/bar.php?id=10
with
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsportmenow.com%2Fbar.php%3Fid%3D10
But this sends me to a blank page (firefox and chrome)
as does simply
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=sportmenow.com
Is this because of some issue with the site hosting? It is accessible to the web...
I needed to add facebooks OG tags. I guess this is a relatively new requirement? I inherited this site recently, so I was not present when it was implemented first, but I hear it was working.
How did I infer this
Step 1 - I have just discovered the Facebook debugger
this page suggests that there is something wrong with the formating of my html or something in that area, and it is possible that the critical error is the one causing this issue.
There is also wave.com which also performs such checks, but not sure if they are the same errors.
Step 2- Critical Error Linting URL: An internal error occurred while linting the URL and others kept suggesting the og tags which led me to try it out. Adding a og:image tag fixed it.

Unable to download og:image, although it's accessible from withing the debugger

We're a website completely written in PHP, we use facebook metatags since we provide facebook sharing, liking, etc...
problem is when we share a link from our site to facebook, it shows the picture correctly, however trying to reshare the same link from another user, removes the picture and shows the link only.
Further troubleshooting using the FB debug tool shows below error message:
Unable to download og:image‎‎‏: The image referenced by the url of og:image tag could not be downloaded.‎
The weird thing is that the image is already see and accessible in the debugger!!
A sample page:
http://fbcomics.com/home/index/92/date/1462
Debugger for it:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Ffbcomics.com%2Fhome%2Findex%2F92%2Fdate%2F1462
Your cooperation is highly appreciated.
I think that you probably need to urlencode() the url value going into the content attribute of your og:image meta tag.
This might be related to a recent Facebook bug. https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/239522122851150
Issue was solved by itself. It seems that Facebook needs sometime (weeks I think) to store the page information including the picture using its crawlers.
If you face this, most probably you'll need to wait for sometime before sharing your new pages.
Thanks,

twitter's tweet button count does not count

I have a php generated wep page which has a lot of share buttons. Twitter, facebook and google+.
I have used the code that twitter gives for the tweet button, and it works fine.
You click it, the window pops up, you tweet.
My problem is, the count next to the button seems to be working normally throughout the site, except the photo gallery, which seems stuck at 0 even though I have tweeted it to test.
My page is here
Is there some obvious error in it?
Also, are there any tools for detecting such errors for twitter like facebook has the OG debugger?
I don't know what exactly the problem is. I have faced with such issues in the past. May be an issue with twitter.
There are a few problems related to this.
If the link is shortened, Twitter won't add it up unless you add the "counturl" url property.
You may try adding these parameters in the tweet button code. This worked for me in one of my projects
data-url="http://dev.twitter.com/pages/tweet_button"
data-count="vertical"
data-counturl="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>"
Also another issue with twitter tweet button is that the tweet counts are not accurate in real time. They are cached and updated asynchronously. See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/tweet_button_faq#count-api-increment

Crawl Website using PHP

I've tried a bunch of techniques to crawl this url (see below), and for some reason the title comes back incorrect. If I look at the source of the page with firebug I can see the correct title tag, however, if I view the page source it's different.
Using several php techniques I get the same result. Digg is able to crawl the page and parse the correct title.
Here's the link: http://lifehacker.com/#!5772420/how-to-make-ios-more-like-android
The correct title is "How to Make Your iPhone (or Other iOS Device) More Like Android"
The parsed title is "Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done"
Is this normal? How are they doing this? Is there a way to get the correct title?
That's because when you request it using PHP (without any JS support) you're getting the main page of lifehacker - which is lifehacker.com.
Lifehacker switched their CMS recently so that all requests go to an initial page and then everything after the hashbang is read by a JS script in the main page to figure out which page needs to be served. You need to modify your program to take this into account
EDIT
Have a gander at these links
http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/09/Hash-Blecch
Found the answer:
http://lifehacker.com/#!5772420/how-to-make-ios-more-like-android
becomes:
http://lifehacker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5772420/how-to-make-ios-more-like-android

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