Posting pages to facebook doesn't work with own domain name

richpepp · October 9, 2013

Hi folks

I was following the recent suggestion of using pages to create a blog and set up a page for a friend of mine. We went to post it on facebook and discovered that if you take the custom domain URL and post it into facebook then you get only the bio info. If you take the yourname.smugmug.com version and post it you get the page info which is what you want. So in our case the blog page is at

http://www.petermclarenfineart.com/Blog/GlassmountGalleryProject

But if you paste that into facebook you get this:

However, if instead you paste this into facebook:

http://petermclarenfineart.smugmug.com/Blog/GlassmountGalleryProject

you get this which is what you want:

It picks up the gallery description and featured photo nicely. Clearly it is possible to work around this by using the smugmug URL initially and then editing the URL in facebook to the custom domain after you've pasted it into facebook but it would be nice if you didn't have to

Best wishes all

Rich

The Mechanic · October 9, 2013

Hi richpepp,

Can you please try a few things. First please make sure external links is set to yes on the gallery where the image is featured from. Also you can use the Facebook Debug tool to update what they will show for your link here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug . This will ensure they have the latest data indexed for a given url.

Thanks -Scott

richpepp · October 9, 2013

Hi there

First please make sure external links is set to yes on the gallery where the image is featured from

Yes, it was already done otherwise we couldn't have got the second correct image above if I understand correctly

Also you can use the Facebook Debug tool to update what they will show for your link here

Well I ran the custom domain URL through that and below is what I got:

If I run the http://petermclarenfineart.smugmug.c...GalleryProject through instead then that works fine. It looks as though there is some sort of app associated with smugmug.com which isn't associated with the custom domain of course as I have never created any face book app. It does mean though that pasting custom domain URLs to facebook won't work nicely

Andy · October 9, 2013

Try delinting again...

Because it's working fine here for me

WinsomeWorks · October 9, 2013

If Andy's works, but his is from a gallery, I wonder if the blog page gets treated differently from a gallery page for some reason. Is there anything educational about that phrase "of type 'article' " they've got in the bug report? I.e. wonder if they'd call it an "article" when it's a gallery. Idk nothing... just pondering.

richpepp wrote: »

Hi there

Yes, it was already done otherwise we couldn't have got the second correct image above if I understand correctly

Well I ran the custom domain URL through that and below is what I got:

If I run the http://petermclarenfineart.smugmug.c...GalleryProject through instead then that works fine. It looks as though there is some sort of app associated with smugmug.com which isn't associated with the custom domain of course as I have never created any face book app. It does mean though that pasting custom domain URLs to facebook won't work nicely

richpepp · October 10, 2013

Hi Andy/Anna Lisa. I was wondering if it was a blog/gallery thing but it doesn't appear to be. Any www.petermclarenfineart.com URL i post on the debug page gives the same error. Interestingly though If I post up the same link as Andy did into the facebook debugger I get the same error as I did on my site. If I post up a gallery link onto my facebook page as Andy did then I see the same as Andy does ie. the photo and description from the gallery which is what we want.

eg. this:

http://www.petermclarenfineart.com/Still-life

Gives me this

If I now go back and post a link to the blog page:

http://www.petermclarenfineart.com/Blog/GlassmountGalleryProject

I still get this

ie. no photo and the description from the bio rather than the page.

It looks like facebook is picking up the correct info. for galleries but not for pages as Anna Lisa surmised

Rich

WinsomeWorks · October 10, 2013

So I think you mean it does appear to be a blog page versus gallery issue in actuality, but the debug report doesn't exactly show it to be an issue? (i.e., the debug report makes it appear as if both would be problematic, but the gallery seems to work anyway)? Weird.

Andy · October 10, 2013

WinsomeWorks wrote: »

If Andy's works, but his is from a gallery, I wonder if the blog page gets treated differently from a gallery page for some reason.

Nope. Works from any page on on my site:

Here's a Folder:
Andy%20Williams.png

Here's a Page:
Andy%20Williams.png

And I get the same positive result for photos in lightbox, date, keyword, etc.

As to the text that FB will use - if there's a gallery description, that info will be used in lieu of the sitewide meta info.

richpepp · October 10, 2013

Oh now it's just plain confusing. Andy is correct in that his page works. I have also now created two new pages, one unlisted and one public to see if that makes a difference. Both work perfectly

(they are /Blog/TestPage and /TestPage2 (without the blog))

However.... the original http://www.petermclarenfineart.com/Blog/GlassmountGalleryProject still doesn't work. It has a description, a featured image, is set to Inherit (public) and is smug and google searchable. It makes no sense

any clues anyone?

edit: Just had a thought. When I first posted the Glassmount page I didn't have the description/photo so I'm wondering if facebook has cached the details. I'm off to test that theory...

richpepp · October 10, 2013

And there you go, that was the problem - facebook caching. I created a third test page and put a featured photo but no description. When posted to facebook it picked up the featured photo and correctly took the description from the bio. I then went back to TestPage3 and added a description for that gallery and removed the featured photo. When I went back to facebook and pasted the link it still had the featured photo and the bio description. Back in my very first post it obviously worked for petermclarenfineart.smugmug.com/Blog/GlassmountGalleryProject because facebook hadn't yet cached that.

Obviously in this case this happened over a few minutes but the GalleryProject page was about 36 hours ago now and it is still using cached details. So that's the lesson - always set your gallery descriptions and featured photos before posting to facebook

Thanks all for your help

Rich

Posting pages to facebook doesn't work with own domain name

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