It is possible to display your Wordpress blog on Facebook, and connecting them is not as hard as you may think. There are plugins designed to do exactly that, and with everything social network based, anything that allows you to spread the word can only be a good thing, especially as Facebook applications tend to snowball, and gain more followers.
To integrate the blog you must use the Wordbook plugin, which was developed by John Eckman in 2009. The advantages of using the plugin are clear, as your blog now has two lives, one from the original web page, and one on Facebook.
To set up the connection, you use the above plugin and the Facebook API’s. You will need the following information to connect them.
Root directory of your blog.
Secret – You will receive this from Facebook after registering as a developer
API Key – You will receive this from Facebook after registering as a developer
Wordbook plugin.
Follow these steps to connect the two.
Register as a developer on Facebook, you must already have an existing FB account to do this. Follow this link to register. Once you have agreed the terms and conditions you will receive the following:
Secret
API Key
You will need these later.
You will be asked to submit the “post-authorize call back URL”, and the post-remove call back URL”. In both fields you enter the root directory of your blog with a trailing slash. Effectively, these handle authorizations when a user posts or removes the application.
Next create a canvas page, and enter the root directory with a trailing slash in the “Canvas Call Back URL” field. If you miss the slash, then internal links on your Wordpress blog will not work with Facebook.
Under canvas page settings, you are given two options to render the page. iFrame, of FBML. FBML is Facebook’s XML scheme to use Facebook tags such as profiles and so on, and it also access procedures. The Wordbook plugin however, works using iFrame. This option should make the application work a little faster, and only internal links will have to be adjusted on the blog to make them work.
After this is complete install the Wordbook plugin. This installs using the normal Wordpress method. If you are unsure how to do this, follow this link.
Once installed you can enter the API key and secret into the relevant fields via the settings panel. You will also need to enter the URL of the canvass page, to enter in the canvass page field. In this field be sure you only enter the name of the blog AND NOT http://apps.facebook.com/. So for my blog I would just enter “Teahon”, and not http://apps.facebook.com/Teahon
The only thing left to do is to choose your options from inside the setting panel on your Wordpress blog, and you’re done. Play around a little bit and see what suits you best.
A quick note about privacy on Facebook and how it views websites and blogs. When you link your blog with Facebook, it will view it as another application, and subsequently it will pull through any personal details such as date of birth etc. This is how Facebook creates its social networks. This will also allow the administrator of the blog information about you as a user.
However, by connecting your blog to Facebook, there are possibilities of communities being established around it, and thus with it advertising opportunities you would not normally have had.
In the social networking world, the better connected all your social networking sites are, the better the traffic you generate. In many cases this is the name of the game.
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