Anyone who has developed against Facebook’s API knows that the only constant is change – Facebook is an ever-evolving platform. In Social we’ve made changes a few different times to the way we broadcast links.

Our original posting approach was working fine, but as Facebook started rolling out their “Share” feature, it wasn’t available on links being published by Social. We poked around and found that if we used a different endpoint then the Share feature would be available for these broadcasts. So we made the change.

Recently another problem popped up. The Facebook broadcasts were no longer showing up with the post’s featured image. Turns out that feature was removed from the endpoint we were using. Fortunately, the original endpoint we were using (which does allow us to send an image with the link) started supporting the Share feature, so we’ve switched back to that one in Social 2.7.

For posts that have no image, Facebook falls back on it’s Open Graph protocol. If you want to tell Facebook what image to use with your broadcasts, you can do so by installing one of a number of Facebook Open Graph plugins.

This post is part of the project: Social. View the project timeline for more context on this post.