How to get my blog to properly list the OG information on FaceBook

Question

I wonder if anyone could help me out here. I've been debugging and debugging. I tried putting aborts on the page in several places within the framework, both on the controller and view levels. But I still don't see why it should give an error.

I am running a blog website (ColdFusion on Railo with CFWheels as framework) and am trying to get my facebook opengraph tags to work but currently the LINT tool is just throwing 500 errors at me. It's strange because the URL works fine for normal web visitors. The W3Cvalidator can also read the url. It is just Facebook that doesn't want to read it. Even without the opengraph tags defined it throws an error without any debugging.

See Facebook Object Debugger or any other article on that website for that matter.

Thanks in advance for your help, much appreciated.

Answer 1

When Facebook tries to scrape your page for Open Graph metatags, it uses a specific user agent in the http request - ie facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+https://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php).

It looks like your server returns 500 internal error whenever this user agent is present. You should revise your server configuration to handle this user agent correctly. Then the Facebook scraper and debugger tool will be able to scrape your page.