Hello Gordon,

It actually depends on whether or not you have selected a blog image when you create a new blog post on the site. If you have already selected a blog image, EasyBlog should already pick up this image and automatically submit to Facebook when a new blog post is created.

Non of our blog posts use the blog image feature because they want to place the images themselves, and if they used the blog image, it would show up twice in some contexts.

Let me ask the question again a different way. Why does auto posting use a different algorithm for extracting a short synopsis of the article that the algorithm that is used to populate the list of articles on the frontage? If our articles look good on our frontage, why should they look crappy when auto posted to Facebook? The random selection of images from within the blogpost makes the Autoposting feature useless to us!

Is there any way to fix this?

-Gordon

Hello Gordon,

Facebook requires that the image that is being submitted when posting through their API to be at a specific ratio. If you only embed the image into the blog post, there's no way to resize this image as opposed to blog images. With blog images, we have full control over the width / height of these images and we're able to send to Facebook a link to the image that meets their requirements

That's funny because the button that user's have available to them to share the blog on Facebook doesn't have this restriction. Those pictures come through just fine. That means at least part of the EB software is able to cope effectively with embedded pictures.

The problem with using a blog image is that it shows up in too many places and often duplicates the images that are part of the blog post. The idea that one picture at the top of the blog is the only picture in the blog is a very restrictive and outdated blog notion. We found we could not use blog images effectively. Now It appears we can't use auto posting effectively either.

It's really too bad that the EB Software is so inflexible. Since your other interface takes the first picture and separates it from the intro text, it's hard for me to believe you couldn't do the same thing with the auto posting interface. Neither interface is trying to represent the entire post. They are both just providing links. In the case of Autoposting, all the posts appear unkept and unorganized because of picking random pictures (if they include any pictures at all!)

Tell me what the requirements are for the first picture in the blog article, and I'll make certain we edit our pictures to meet the Facebook import requirement. Would that solve the problem?

Hello Gordon,

I have checked the code again and it does seem that we try to match the first image that is found in the blog post. Perhaps EasyBlog wasn't able to detect this in your blog post (I am not too sure). Can you provide us with the back end and FTP access to check into this? Also, which particular blog post are you testing this on and also how do I view the result of the auto posted item?

I've just finished cleaning up all the garbage auto posts in Facebook, so unfortunately, I no longer have any examples to point you to of how they are corrupted on Facebook.

I have manually gone through and "shared" the posts on Facebook effectively manually bypassing the autopost feature, and the results can be seen here: http://www.facebook.com/FamilyFirstBroomfield. Of course the Facebook entries are all links back to the original blog so you should not have any trouble also looking at the corresponding sources that are served off the site.

Thanks for looking into this.

-Gordon

Hello Gordon,

Hm, maybe the next time before you submit a blog post, start a new thread in our forums here and provide us with the access to the site and I'll try to check that out

Meanwhile if you give me the acceptable dimensions of the first image, we can make certain our images comply.

Thanks,

Gordon

Hello Gordon,

I might be wrong about the "image dimensions" because after you mentioned about sharing the blog post manually and it works fine for you, it should also work fine out of the box with the automated posts.