facebook

Ahmad Byagowi, the project lead for Open Compute Project's Time Appliance, reached out to me a couple weeks ago and asked if I'd be willing to test the new Time Card Facebook had announced in mid-August on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. Since I have a sort of obsession with plugging anything and everything into a Pi to see what works and what doesn't, I took him up on the offer.

The official specs had PCI Express Gen 3 on a x4 slot as a requirement, but it seems the Gen 3 designation is a little loose—the card and its driver should work fine on an older Gen 2 bus—like the one the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 exposes if you use the official IO Board:

The slot is x1, but you can plug in any width card using an adapter like this one or by hacking an open end into it with a razor saw or dremel tool.

I integrate Facebook posting with a few different websites and services, so I've gotten to know Facebook's Open Graph and API pretty well over the past few years. A lot of sites I work with automatically post new stories straight to a Facebook Page's wall, and have a format with a message and an attached link. All of these parameters are well documented in Facebook's API under Post.

However, lately I've been getting the following error message whenever a site uses the first method below to send a post with a link attached:

I tried using the Open Graph Explorer, the official Facebook SDK for PHP, and other methods to see if there was any other way to get around that exception, but nothing I did turned out any different response.

For a very long time, for my simple Catholic News Live fan page on Facebook, I was using RSS Graffiti to post new stories to Facebook (usually in batches of 3-5). RSS Graffiti is super-easy to set up, and it simply ties into your existing site's RSS feed to post new stories from your site to Facebook.

However, after I redesigned the Catholic News Live website in Drupal 7, I decided I'd take a few extra minutes to rework the site's social integration for Twitter and Facebook (I was using HootSuite for Twitter postings—a batch of 5 stories per hour maximum—and RSS Graffiti for Facebook.

People who followed both accounts weren't engaging, liking, or even sharing/retweeting stories too much. The twitter account was doing okay, because Twitter doesn't seem to hide tweets from other users as much as Facebook likes hiding certain posts (especially those from automated apps like RSS Graffiti).

Other graphs, like the shares, likes, etc. are similarly aligned.

After reading this comment thread about Facebook logins on ReadWriteWeb, I feel sad to call myself a Facebook user. The sheer number of clueless users who actually thought ReadWriteWeb was Facebook is a sad fact. The fact that they login to facebook by going to Google and typing in "Facebook Login" is also sad. Could they not simply type in facebook.com? I guess the idea of a URL is too outlandish for people.

What about a bookmark? My grandma, who only does a few things on the web, knows how to make a bookmark and go back to it. A lot of the Facebook users who posted comments looked quite a bit younger than my grandma, and, apparently, they cannot figure out things she could do in her sleep!