Matt's "Face Link" Tool
This tool is written by Matt B and inspired by facebook's link attachment which gives you nice text and a picture to make your link out of. This tool doesn't (yet) pull an image from the link but uses bitpixels.com to create a screenshot which is almost as good I think and works even if there are no images on the page. This tool is also good for checking out what meta data your page is dishing up.
How to use: put your link (including the http) into the box and press the button.
Face Link Tool Geeky Info
Some more usefull information about Lord Matt's Face Link Tool for those that like to know about it.
- Version : 1.7(b)
- Coded by : Lord Matt
- Usage : Free to use but please keep the attribtuions
- Lasted Improved : 15th June 2011
- Bookmarklet: Face Link (drag to links bar)
- API : I'm actively working on that now (2011)
- My Activity Tool : This powers a little bit of it.
Face Link Tool FAQ
- What do I do?
- Put your link in the box, press the button and then copy the code and put it on your blog or web page or whatever. I think it is dead good for writting reviews of other sites or answering a blog post with another blog post.
- Why is there no description?
- I can only work with what is available. This tool needs the description meta data to be set on the page. Without that all is lost.
- Why is the title the link?
- I can only work with what is available. This tool can get the title from one of a few places but sometimes these are just not set. What can you do?
- Does this work with all sites?
- For most sites this will be fine but those web pages without a description or some form of title (title tag or meta tag) will not produce a nice box. Generally Blogger (blogspot.com) blogs will not link well as most templates appear to be lacking basic head tags such as title and description. While I will be trying to make this work even with badly formed sites the less information they make available the less I can use.
- How do I control what appears for my site?
- You can control everything about the link by setting your information correctly. This app uses the meta descption tag, the meta title tg and the title tag to try and form a valid information box. These SEO basics should be set on any self respecting web page anyway.
- When will the API be ready?
- When I finish it. I'm not getting paid (yet) for all this so the API has to wait for things that do pay. If you want to send me some cash that would make it more likely to happen this year.
- Can I link to my link code?
- Sure, why not?
- Can I remove the attribution? Can I pay to do this?
- Nope & nope, sorry. The attribution is required for the screenshot service so even if I let you drop the attribution to me you would still need to attribute someone for part of it.
- Do you support facebook's Open Graph protocol?
- Not yet no. In theory it should not take too long to code in the extra but one has to put food on the table.
Find out more about Matt
If you liked this tool you might also like Matt's blog The Fantastic Site of Lord Matt or if you want to hire Matt then you can contact him here
.