With all the news lately about Facebook, I thought it prudent to investigate what’s involved in adding a Like button to my pages. Details are given here:
Scroll to the bottom of that page and you will see how to generate the code for a customized Like button. I generated an iFrame version and pasted that code into a Markup item in one of my Freeway pages. It works quite well. But the full-function Like button that uses the JavaScript SDK sounded more interesting:
I couldn’t get this XFBML version to work. Then again, I am brain dead to code. I tried copying that block of code and pasting it into page markup Before , and I then put the XFBML code into a markup item on my Freeway page. Didn’t work. I then tried dumping both blocks of code into the same Markup item on the page. Didn’t work.
By not including an href attribute, the code automatically uses the URL for the page, thus giving you the ability to bung this in your Master Page and forgetting about it.
I have the added fun of using Joomla for the site example I have given to the mix. It should all work in a pure Freeway environment. I may also have got bits of this wrong (ie code locations), but it seems to work fine for me at the moment.
Actually, Paul, the section just above the URL you provided sheds more light on the simple “Like button” that my opening post was talking about:
You see, having the user “log into a site” via their Facebook account is asking a bit too much of the user, I think. It would seem that more Facebookers would want to click a “Like” button and share a given website with their friends than they would want to log into a site. For unless I am misunderstanding how this works, it would see that a simple “Like button” to “share a URL” would have less privacy implications than would formally logging into a site.
Most Facebookers I know are just like me. We use it only for opening up to a close set of friends and family. We don’t just make friends with anyone and we don’t think of it was a way to spend our hard earned cash. I share URLs with my Facebooke “friends” and add a sentence of two of commentary. But that’s about it. “Logging into a site” goes far beyond what I personally would ever want to do with Facebook.
So in light of this, what are your thoughts on merely adding a “Like button” to a Freeway web page?
I still feel there are less “privacy” implications for adding a Facebook “Like button” to a web page than there are with adding a full “login” feature. However, I am still not clear on what is required to get the “Like button” setup properly on a page using Freeway.
I tried this out the other day and it was as simple as adding the following to a markup item (replacing www.softpress.com with whatever site you like or full path to the page you’re adding it to and width/height with whatever you want them to be):
I still feel there are less “privacy” implications for adding a Facebook “Like button” to a web page than there are with adding a full “login” feature. However, I am still not clear on what is required to get the “Like button” setup properly on a page using Freeway.
Just watch, when you do that, because a Markup Item will generate a P around an iframe, and that’s invalid, I believe. The Crowbar will allow you to do the same thing as a Markup Item, but without the surrounding paragraph.
I get a bit lost in this but I’ve not had any trouble putting the code from Facebook Like Button instructions into my Freeway chosen page…I just cannot control where it goes on the page. It always ends up either waaaay up in the upper left corner or waaaaay down in the lower left corner. When I click open the Markup box I’ve tried several of the options and get nowhere.
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On 9 Nov 2010, at 20:03, CarolynMB wrote:
I get a bit lost in this but I’ve not had any trouble putting the code from Facebook Like Button instructions into my Freeway chosen page…I just cannot control where it goes on the page. It always ends up either waaaay up in the upper left corner or waaaaay down in the lower left corner. When I click open the Markup box I’ve tried several of the options and get nowhere.
choose your settings and click Get Code. Either of the versions they give you (iframe or FBML, Facebook Markup Language) will work in a regular markup item from the Insert menu.
Joe
On 1 Mar 2011, at 06:37, JDW wrote:
Helveticus, could you please offer us a link to an example web page where you have used it, so we can see what it looks like and how it operates?
Thanks, Helveticus, I was able to get a Facebook “Like” button using your code on our site. I had to insert it as a standard mark-up item, rather than using CrowBar which didn’t work for me (I don’t know enough to know why).
For whatever reason, the Facebook developer’s page you most recently linked to was down (it’s back up now), so I’m glad you had posted that older code. I wonder if there’s any reason to redo it with newer Facebook code, since it seems to be working correctly as is.
If anyone’s curious, you can see the Like button in action on our site at http://bubcap.com. The nice thing is, I had already done a lot of personal P.R. on Facebook, so the brand new Like button already shows we have a bunch of Likes.
Darn, wish I could edit the above post. I realize going through Facebook lets you customize the way the Like button is displayed, and other details. And it also generates iFrame code as well as XFBML.
My success was inserting the XFBML code as a regular mark-up item.
Great, thanks for the input, Rob. Both the iFrame and FBML versions work should just fine in a markup item.
Joe
On 14 Mar 2011, at 21:45, Rob wrote:
Darn, wish I could edit the above post. I realize going through Facebook lets you customize the way the Like button is displayed, and other details. And it also generates iFrame code as well as XFBML.
My success was inserting the XFBML code as a regular mark-up item.
The reason why you would use CrowBar instead of a markup item is
subtle: if you have an inline layout, and add a markup item as an
inline child of an HTML box, then Freeway will wrap that Markup Item
in a P tag. Depending on what you paste into the MI, that will
probably be invalid HTML in the end, which can lead to inconsistent
results in JavaScript. CrowBar detects if it is applied in this
manner, and removes the surrounding P tag, or moves the CB outside of
the P tag if it’s not alone within it.
Walter
On Mar 15, 2011, at 4:20 AM, Joe Billings wrote:
Great, thanks for the input, Rob. Both the iFrame and FBML versions
work should just fine in a markup item.
Thanks for the expert advice! For complete disclosure:
I don’t fully know what I’m doing with Freeway Pro, so I’m not even sure what an inline child is. I assume it’s one of 1,000 phrases or terms I need to learn.
Waltd, any thoughts why CrowBar didn’t work for me, but a standard markup item did?
Joe, I never even tried the iFrame (or any code from Facebook), I only used the code I copied from Helveticus (above), which happened to be identical to Helveticus’ code, except for the width parameter.
Helveticus, I noticed you have a completely separate Like link for each of your pages, so some pages show zero likes, or less likes than your home page. Is there some SEO or other strategy to doing it that way? I just have the same link on all my pages.
Any thoughts on how, and to what degree, does having Facebook Likes on your page helps? Is it simply a way to add credibility by showing a lot of likes? Do you think Facebook does any proprietary behind-the-scene manipulation of Like data? Actually, don’t answer this unless you feel compelled, I realize I should just Google it.