Random(Notes): facebook

Last week was having awful time fighting with strange work of Facebook. We had a page with OG meta tags and a Facebook Like button on the page. And Facebook was discarding to parse the page and extract data from OG meta tags. Using URL linter didn't help to find the problem but show the same information - page isn't parsed, OG meta tags are not used.

So I tried to check next things to find the issue:

whether property attribute in used <meta/> tags

whether correct fb:app_id meta tag value is set

whether nginx returns correct page when facebook requests the page

whether correct namespaces added to the <html/> tag

whether we are using UTF-8 encoding

and something other, don't remember all my tests

And was checking web page through URL Linter each time. With no success. Facebook discarded parsing the page and fetching page title with other data from meta tags.

So I reviewed response/request data through firebug to find suspicious things. I found one scanty detail: Content-Type header had value "text/html;charset=utf-8;charset=UTF-8".
I must say, this one web page is generated by application using user-defined template. Grails controller is responsible for handling request and renders output like:


  render text: context.out, contentType: "text/html;charset=$AppConstant.RENDER_CHARSET"

where AppConstant.RENDER_CHARSET equals to "UTF-8". But the rendered page had Content-Type equal to "text/html;charset=utf-8;charset=UTF-8". And my thought was to fix header value to have something like "text/thml;charset=UTF-8" and hoped this may help. So I changed code to be like:


  render text: context.out, contentType: "text/html"

Content-Type header value now is "text/html;charset=utf-8". So I tried URL Lint again. I wasn't expecting much from Facebook this time either, but miracle happened! Everything works fine now. I know, that is my fault, but, nevertheless, thank you Facebook for "nice" time spending :).

Random(Notes)

Facebook Posters

Facebook was failing to parse OG meta tags