November 30, 2011, 6:27 pm

I frequently get emails from users of SFC saying that their Like/Send buttons or Publish buttons are putting in weird content, or getting the wrong images, or things like that. Many presume it to be a bug in SFC itself or some kind of plugin incompatibility. Actually, it’s neither of those. You’re running into what I call the Facebook Cache.

See, Facebook does more than simply let you send things to their pages and so forth. More and more, they’re becoming a search engine. Facebook actually crawls the web, to some degree.

When you click a Facebook Like button, Facebook’s servers retrieve the webpage you’re viewing, and parse it for the OpenGraph meta tags. These tags tell Facebook what content to display for a link. The title, the image, maybe audio or video, etc. SFC does a pretty good job of automatically populating your entire website with these OpenGraph tags, invisibly (side note, Google+ will use these same tags, although they also have their own set of tags you can use too).

Generally, users who email me about this problem are just using SFC for the first time, and have previously had Like buttons on their page manually, or have been sharing their links on Facebook manually at some other point. This is where they run into the issue: Facebook caches the results of this crawl, usually for a long time. So when somebody clicks a Like button, it doesn’t have to pull the contents of the page if it’s already pulled those contents once before. So since SFC is now populating the OpenGraph meta tags, but FB is reading the cached version instead, the data doesn’t match up.

There’s a simple one-time fix for this problem. Facebook has made an OpenGraph debugger tool:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

On this page, you’ll find a simple box asking for a URL. Put in the URL of the page having the problem, and the tool will go and force retrieve the content of the page and display the parsed OpenGraph meta tags.

Now, this is meant to be a debugging tool for people trying to add OpenGraph tags to their site, but it has a rather nice side-effect. When it forcibly retrieves the page, it also updates Facebook’s cached info for that URL. So all you have to do to make Facebook see your updated content is to take the problem URL, put it in there, and hit the Debug button. Now go back to the page, refresh it, and try the Like/Send button again. Voila, it’s magically fixed to show whatever the Debugger tool saw.

So if you’re having trouble getting some particular page to work in the way you’re expecting, try the debugger tool on the URL first.

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Category: Other  |  5 Comments

November 29, 2011, 7:36 am

Just a quick note to state this as a fact, in case anybody was wondering (and since I’ve had a few emails about it lately).

Under no circumstances will I ever implement Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” in Simple Facebook Connect. If you want such a thing, I recommend using another plugin.

Facebook’s frictionless sharing is a privacy invading, oversharing, useless-result creating nightmare. I block websites that use it from appearing in my News Feed, I remove Applications and services that implement it (hey Yahoo!, you’ve been axed from my life entirely because of your use of this crap), and I will not help anybody to implement it or even provide them with useful advice.

In my opinion, this is by far the worst thing Facebook has ever created. Even if you ignore the privacy implications entirely, Facebook has finally succeeded at doing something that they have been trying to do for ages: Make Facebook’s main feed almost completely worthless.

I will continue to add other features to SFC, but I use FB a lot less than I did before (and am now focusing more on Google+ anyway). However, this is one “feature” that I will not be adding.

Oh, and I’m not the only one who thinks this idea sucks rocks, BTW.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57324406-256/how-facebook-is-ruining-sharing/
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/why-the-new-york-times-isnt-using-facebooks-frictionless-sharing/245880/
http://technorati.com/blogging/article/facebooks-frictionless-sharing-causes-friction-among/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/It-Took-Two-Months-but-People-Finally-Realize-that-Facebook-s-Auto-Sharing-Is-Creepy-235716.shtml

/rant

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Category: Other, Rants  |  8 Comments

October 31, 2011, 5:20 pm


Wrote this quick WordPress code snippet at WordCamp Louisville. It makes a /random/ URL on your site which redirects to a random post. Thought some people might find it useful.

Not a perfect little snippet, but gets the job done. Note the use of the little-used 307 redirect for temporary redirection. This is to make browsers not cache the results of the redirect, like some of them might do with a 302.

add_action('init','random_add_rewrite');
function random_add_rewrite() {
       global $wp;
       $wp->add_query_var('random');
       add_rewrite_rule('random/?$', 'index.php?random=1', 'top');
}

add_action('template_redirect','random_template');
function random_template() {
       if (get_query_var('random') == 1) {
               $posts = get_posts('post_type=post&orderby=rand&numberposts=1');
               foreach($posts as $post) {
                       $link = get_permalink($post);
               }
               wp_redirect($link,307);
               exit;
       }
}

There’s plugins that do this sort of thing too, but this is such a simple little thing that it doesn’t really need a big amount of code to do.

Edit: Added get_permalink() optimization from @Raherian.

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Category: Code, WordPress  |  15 Comments

October 16, 2011, 5:43 pm

If you read “how-to” stuff for WordPress sites around the web, then you frequently run across what many people like to call “snippets”. Short bits of code or functions to do various things. I myself post snippets frequently, usually made up on the fly to solve somebody’s specific problem.

One question I get a fair amount is “where do I add this code?”

The usual answer to this for a lot of people is “in the theme’s functions.php file”. This is a quick solution, but it is often a problematic one.

The reason this has become the more or less go-to place to add these snippets is because it’s complicated to explain to a newbie how to make a plugin and activate it, or to point out the problems with modifying core code, or plugin code. Saying to look for a specific file in their theme, on the other hand, is quick and easy, and until recently theme upgrades have been fairly rare.

However, as themes get upgrades, it becomes more and more incorrect to tell people to modify them directly. And telling people how to create child themes is complex, even if it’s easy to do.

So I’d like to start a new trend, and recommend that people start making Site-Specific Plugins. Most people who run WP sites on a serious level do this in some way already, but if you make it sorta-standard practice, then it’ll make things simpler all around.

How to create a Site-Specific Plugin

1. Create a new directory in the plugins directory. Name it after the site in some fashion. For example, /wp-content/plugins/example.com or something like that.

2. Create a new php file in that directory. Name is dealer’s choice.

3. Put this in the file:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Site Plugin for example.com
Description: Site specific code changes for example.com
*/

4. Finally, go activate your new blank plugin on the site.

Now you have a simple and specific place to add snippets. It will survive upgrades of any sort, and you can edit it to add new code on an as needed basis. What’s more, it’s kinda sorta break-proof. If the user uses the built-in plugin editor to edit it, and they add code that breaks the site, then the editor detects that on saving the code and deactivates the plugin, preventing the “white screen of death” for their site.

This is a much better way to use “snippets” than the theme’s functions.php file, and we should really use it more often in our replies to users.

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Category: Other, WordPress  |  21 Comments

October 11, 2011, 7:42 pm

If you’re seeing this, then my site has been migrated to DreamHost.

Note that while I set things up, I fully expect the site to break from time to time. So… gimme time to get it working properly.

TODO Step 2: Switch to nginx. :)

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Category: Uncategorized  |  9 Comments

October 8, 2011, 4:03 pm

Didn’t know about this one, but if you’re having a problem where the FB login buttons added by SFC don’t seem to do anything, try this:

  1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps/ and click on the App in question.
  2. In the left menu, under Settings, click Advanced and look at the settings in the Migrations section.
  3. Switch the “Encrypted Access Token” setting to ‘Enabled’.

Might fix the issue.

 

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Category: Code  |  12 Comments

October 8, 2011, 12:43 pm

I’ve been hosting my sites on GoDaddy for years, despite everybody saying that they suck and so forth. I’ve even defended them. Their interface is crap, but it’s not terrible once you get used to it. It works well enough. Their shared servers are indeed overloaded, but with a little super-caching they tended to work alright. Their new cloud hosting service is definitely faster.

But if there’s one thing I can not stand, it’s censorship.

I recently discovered that a couple of old posts of mine about decoding code used by hackers were no longer loading up. Everything else worked, but not those posts. I couldn’t even pull them up in the WordPress post editor.

After some trial and error and back and forth, I discovered that any HTTP or FTP request that contains the string “eval(base 64_decode(” or similar variants, is blocked. FTP just stops dead, as does HTTP requests, with a continual spinning loading icon. Apparently they have some form of filtering in the TCP stack somewhere that just stops those connections dead in their tracks.

(BTW, the irony here is thick. GoDaddy’s malicious code scanner was blocking my “Scanning for Malicious Code is Pointless” post.)

GoDaddy… guys, I loved your service in the past, but I have to tell you that this is a *shit* approach to security.

After some tweeting back and forth, I found out from the horse’s mouth that this is intentional and cannot be disabled.

And as much as they’d like to claim this isn’t censorship:

Guys, you’re wrong. It is censorship. I wrote that post content, and they’re refusing to serve it over HTTP. You can spin that any way you like, but GoDaddy hosting is now censoring me.

What’s more, this is a *new* problem. Those posts worked fine when I wrote them. What changed? I dunno. I did move to their 4GH hosting, but nowhere did I see in the documentation that they would be intentionally blocking my content.

Anyway, I’ve worked around the problem for now with a plugin to add spaces to the proper places in my HTML content, thus bypassing their filter. However, in the long run, this will not stand. GoDaddy thinks it’s okay to block my personal content. I disagree with them, and no amount of argument is going to make me change my mind on this topic. Blocking my own content from being served is NOT a security measure.

As you might be able to tell, I’m a bit angry.

Therefore, I am now looking for a new hosting service. Some requirements of mine:

  • Traffic-wise I serve about 6000 page views a day, all told. In terms of total HTTP requests, I’d say somewhere around 30,000 or so.
  • Bandwidth tends to be in the 1.5 GB per day range. So, 50 GB per month, say.
  • Obviously, any form of censorship or technical limitations is unacceptable.
  • SSH access is a must-have.
  • I don’t necessarily need dedicated hosting or virtual dedicated hosting, shared is fine if it can handle it.
  • Speed would be nice. GoDaddy has always sucked in terms of time-to-first-byte. Their cloud hosting made it better, but not great.
  • MySQL Databases. I need at least 10 of them.

So, not too heavy requirements, I’d say.

I’ve heard suggestions for DreamHost in the past, and A Small Orange has always gotten favorable reviews from people I’ve talked to, but what the heck, might as well solicit the opinions of the internets in general, yeah?

Suggestions are happily accepted. If you can provide estimated pricing or links, I’d love to take a look at them. :)

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Category: Other, Rants  |  60 Comments
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