rickardnilsson.net is a weblog and the online home of web developer and father of three, Rickard Nilsson... More
Rickard blogs about creating software solutions using ASP.NET and agile practices.
I’ve created a Facebook page for rickardnilsson.net to be able to share more unedited material to the world than I have time with if I would write blog posts.
…and it will not be just another twitter feed rather I will have the opportunity to discuss and interact with people sharing my set of interests including web development, internet and social media.
Update: I would like to thank all of you who helped med secure a username on Facebook
If you share my interests or like me for some reason, please “Like” me on the button above to get all the extra material as well as blog post updates served conveniently on your Facebook wall.
-- Rickard
Since Facebook launched their share link feature anyone including you can share your site or pages to their friends. You can tailor what is displayed on the Facebook wall in terms of title, description image and URL.
Facebook is smart enough to use the html meta tags on your page for title and description and it may list some or all of the <img> tags to the user to choose from. This is great as a starting point and may be enough in many cases, however in some it is not.
Say that you put a Like button on a page. What happens when a user Likes it is that Facebook uses the title and description as before but it may try to pick an image from the page, probably closest in proximity to the Like button. This may not be what you want as you might want a specific image to be displayed on Likes.
The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the Facebook social graph. You can turn your pages into graph objects by adding additional meta information.
<html xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
<title>Join the dark side with Son of Obsidian Visual Studio color scheme</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="Join the dark side with Son of Obsidian Visual Studio color scheme"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://rickardnilsson.net/post/2011/05/05/join-the-dark-side-with-son-of-obsidian.aspx"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://rickardnilsson.net/image/Rickard_Nilsson.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:description"
content="Join the dark side with Visual Stuide color scheme
Son of Obsidian. Download it from http://studiostyl.es/"/>
...
</head>
</html>
One image may not be enough e.g. when users share your page with the above mentioned Share link feature. To still enable users to pick one of the images on your page you can add additional og:image <meta> tags to the header.