Notes about some things I’ve come across with Facebook that are relevant for web developers.
Link preview / News Feed story
When you add a link to Facebook it detects various details of your page for its link preview. For example it will automatically grab the first image on the page to use as the thumbnail, it grabs the first chunk of text to use as description, etc.
You can customise these things by adding Open Graph tags to your page:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:fb="https://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
<head>
<title>The Rock (1996)</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="movie"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="IMDb"/>
<meta property="fb:admins" content="USER_ID"/>
<meta property="og:description"
content="A group of U.S. Marines, under command of
a renegade general, take over Alcatraz and
threaten San Francisco Bay with biological
weapons."/>
...
</head>
...
</html>
Caching
If you find information caching, for example you change the image but Facebook still uses the old ones, then it’s probably been linked before and Facebook is caching what it found last time.
You can clear the cache by first loading the URL in Facebook’s Debugger.
