405 Not Allowed on Facebook Canvas Page

Mauvis — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:10:06 +0000

I enabled Facebook Canvas for a responsive web app we’re building an noticed despite meeting the SSL requirement and hitting the correct page, that Nginx was returning a 405 Not Allowed.

Turns out Facebook makes a POST request to your HTML page and you need to allow this. Here’s the Nginx code:

location / {
    error_page 405 =200 $uri;
    root /var/www/html/yoursite.com;
}

Facebook Beacon: Cool but Kind of Scary

Mauvis — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:56:03 +0000

A friend of mine was playing an online flash game called Boxhead Zombie Wars and a message suddenly popped up on the lower right corner of his browser window stating that “Kongregate is sending this to your Facebook profile”. I couldn’t believe it so I started playing the game myself and a few minutes into it, sure enough:

“Super freaky!” was my initial thought. Followed closely by “How did they know I’m on the Facebook?”, “How do they know my name?”, and “Is facebook tracking my ip and giving others access to it?”. And lastly, “OMG!”.

I logged into Facebook and the story was there – although awaiting my approval to be posted. This last bit makes me feel a lot better but I still find the whole thing freaky.

Facebook Beacon is the name of this feature. A quick search at Wikipedia explains: “Beacon is a part of Facebook’s advertisements system that sends data from external websites to Facebook, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements, and allowing users to share their activities with their friends.”.

Links:
Facebook’s About Beacon Page
Wikipedia

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405 Not Allowed on Facebook Canvas Page

Facebook Beacon: Cool but Kind of Scary