Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Facebook's URL Linter

Did you know that you can turn your Web site into a Facebook Page? I won't get into many details here (I cover this thoroughly in Chapter 6), but by using a protocol of simple meta tags that you put in the header of your HTML, you can identify your Web site to Facebook as a Page on Facebook's network. When you implement these tags, you can run your Web site by Facebook via its URL Linter (http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/) and Facebook can tell you what it knows about your Web site based on those tags.

So, for instance, I run my own blog at http://staynalive.com. I have added these meta tags to my blog in the header to identify it as a Web site (I could also identify it as a blog), show what URL I want Facebook to link it to, and provide other metadata such as images, my phone number, my e-mail address, and more:

<meta property="fb:page_id" content="12327140265" /> <meta property="fb:app_id" content="293151070252" /> <meta property="og:title" content="Stay N' Alive" /> <meta property="og:type" content="Web site" /> <meta property="og:url" content="http://staynalive.com" /> <meta property="og:phone_number" content="801-853-8339" /> <meta property="fb:admins" content="683545112" /> <meta property="og:description" content="My View of the Real-Time Web - Tech and Rants From Jesse Stay, The 'Social' Geek" /> <meta property="og:email" content="[e-mail]" /> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Stay N' Alive" /> <meta property="og:image" content="http://staynalive.com/wp-content/themes/ ...