Wednesday 20 April 2011

Facebook gives Adobe Flash Player error message

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Facebook gives error Flash message when sharing website link

I was getting pretty frustrated this time. After adding some new features to my client's site, Facebook started giving me this error flash message which was not there before. And it did not make sense because I already had an existing flash component on the site when it worked well.

Adobe Flash error when sharing link on Facebook

The most ridiculous thing was finding out that removing every single flash component on the site did not seem to improve anything. Until after some hair pulling and intensive searching, I finally found just the answer I needed.

Taking a lead from another site, I outline the steps below (which you can add to your home page):

This changes the Title that appears when you share the link:

<meta name="title" content="Title of Article Here" />
This changes the description:

<meta name="description" content="Description of article here" />
And this links to an image of your choice:

<link rel="image_src" type="image/jpeg" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/image/path.jpg"/>

The important bit that causes many people frustration comes here, because you have to proceed on to a Facebook tool called Lint, AFTER you make your above edits. This is to update Facebook's cache about your changes. Otherwise, it won't be reflected and you will end up pulling out hair like me.

Additional Links: 
Html special characters to place in your description. Eg Open and close quotes "".
Facebook Lint Tool
Facebook discussion thread on the thumbnail image when sharing

Wednesday 13 April 2011

Add Addthis buttons Above, Not After each blogger/blogspot post

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Add Addthis toolbar Above or before of each blogger post, not at the tail end!

*This post assumes you already have a blog on blogger.

Everyone is adding these social sharing toolbars these days, and what we shall look at here today is not whether their effects are useful, but rather its implementation.

Add blogger widget feature, but not what we want here.

Addthis.com has thoughtfully allowed us to conveniently add its toolbar as a blogger widget. After trying it out however, I realized that it uses javascript. And it puts the Addthis toolbar to AFTER every blog post automatically. But I wanted it BEFORE. After playing around, it seemed rather hard to massage into place, so I thought heck, lets start from scratch.


Steps to put Addthis where it belongs (at the start of every blogpost):
1. This time, select the "Website" option instead of the "Blogger" option from the Addthis website.

Select the "Website" option instead.

2. Copy the code from the right textbox.
3. Login into your blogger account and enter the desired blog's Design->Edit Html tab.
4. Remember to save a template backup if necessary.
5. Click Expand Widget Templates to reveal the full code.
6. Now search for the lines <div class='post-body entry-content'> and  <data:post.body/>
7. We want to stick the copied Addthis code in BETWEEN these 2 lines.
8. Click Preview or go ahead and Save Template if you are feeling confident today.

We are good to go once again.


Remember to click "Expand Widget Templates"
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