facebooklikebox.jpg

(NOT the real box – just an image)

If you look over in the first sidebar of this blog, you’ll note that I’ve added a Facebook “Like Box” that lets you interact with Voxeo’s Facebook Page directly from the box.

I did this primarily as an experiment to see what impact (or not) it might have on people joining the page as… well… what we used to call “Fans” but now perhaps have to call “Likers”.

As I had to tweak the Facebook-provided code a little bit, I thought I’d write down what I did. First, I went to Facebook’s “Like Box Plugin Page”:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box

On that page you can specify the width of your column, your page name and a few other options. After that you can press the “Get Code” button and, in theory, receive the code you can just “drop in” to your website. (Basically all it is doing is creating an “<iframe>” that pulls content over from Facebook’s site.)

The problem I had was that regardless of whether I unchecked the “Show stream” box, I always received code showing the stream… and that’s way too long for the sidebar here. So I just tweaked their code a bit (note that for display reasons I’ve broken the code up into multiple lines a bit – in reality this is all jammed together as one line):

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?
href=http://www.facebook.com/voxeo&amp;width=185&amp;colorscheme=light
&amp;connections=3&amp;stream=false&amp;header=true&amp;height=200" 
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:185px; height:200px;" 
allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

My changes were:

  • Changed “stream=true” to “stream=false”.
  • Changed the height to be a size that worked for me.

NOTE THAT YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE HEIGHT IN TWO PLACES!

It took a bit of experimentation to figure out the best height, but in the end I now have a box in the sidebar.

P.S. While you’re here, why don’t you become a Fan/Liker/whatever?

Originally from Voxeo Blogs