Facebook Fun

26-07-2011

Being the constant tinkerer that I am I am forever adding little bits to any websites that I maintain. They might be ones somebody mentioned would be nice to have, or just something I saw on another website and figured would be good to have on my own. Regardless of the reason I am always tinkering in the background.

As the long suffering lady friend will attest to.

Recently, while making some requested and long overdue changes to my brother's site I added in something that would suit his site perfectly: a Facebook like button.

Given the nature of his site, random stories of purer randomness, I figured that a visitor might just be inclined to want to share the site with others. This is, apparently, not a huge coding feat. In fact Facebook being Facebook there is a page you can go to where you enter in a few details and it spits out the button for you afterwards.

Simples.

Or so you would think. I had two options open to me. I could either have an overall "like" button for the site or one for each story. I figured just go for an overall one and entered in the main URL for the button. Code was spat out and placed accordingly. While I was there I figured I might as well allow people to like rants on The Bauble. More values were entered, new code spat out, everyone wins.

Except somewhere, somehow, Facebook got very confused. I only found this out last night after the lady friend had been on my brother's site, clicked the "like" button, and apparently liked The Bauble instead.

This was interesting to me. So I went along and had a look at the code of the two "like" buttons. They were both correct, in every way shape and form. Everything contained in them pointed where it should point. Yet if you clicked on the button on his site it added likes to my own.

Not some clever attempt to get hits, I assure you. Despite my post complaining that his site was getting increases of nearly 200% week on week. Honest!

Turns out that the wonderful Facebook tool gets easily confused when making buttons for you. In fact after a bit of a Google this morning I found this tool. Does the same job, but properly this time.

Now all is right in the world again. His "like" button works and mine will in a few minutes. There is a lesson to learn here I am sure. Something about not blindly trusting a giant corporation being able to create a tool that works as intended.

Maybe one about not blindly trusting your older brother because he may try and steal hits from your site, however honest a mistake it was.

Which it was.

Honestly.

Blue_jester