Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve been experimenting with WordPress plugins which connect to Facebook. My first effort was something called Simple Facebook Connect. That one’s a frightful misnomer. If there were any justice in the world, they wouldn’t be allowed to use the word “simple” in the title. In order to use the thing and it’s allegedly fantabulous functionality, one must create a special Facebook App. Fifty-seven WTFs and sixty-three huhs? later, I managed to create an app (or at least I thought I did) and copied and pasted the long strings of jibberish into the correct (?) places. I activated several of the features, and voila! Nothing happened. No FB anything anywhere. I have no idea what went wrong or how to troubleshoot the thing. Somewhere along the way, I even lost track of what I was trying to do exactly. So I gave up on that one, and tried some other plugins.
Next up was the WordPress Facebook Like Plugin. Now that one is simple. It just took a few seconds to download, install, and activate. Now I have like buttons on all the posts that nobody ever reads.
Now, the newest of the bunch: Embed Facebook. Their description says:
Embed Facebook lets you embed various Facebook objects (album, event, group, note, photo, or video) in a post or page. You just need to paste the URL of a Facebook object anywhere in a post or page, the plugin will automatically embed it for you.
Sounds good. I’ve downloaded and installed it, so here’s a test. Here’s a gallery from my new artist page:
Posted by Garth Hagerman Photo & Video on Thursday, April 21, 2011
And here’s the artist page itself:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Garth-Hagerman-Photo-Video/178206532231153