Customizing posts with the new Facebook API update

In an attempt to fight misleading news on their platform, Facebook has recently changed the way you can use their API to edit previews of posts. While before you could specify the header, preview text, and the image, this is no longer possible. Instead, Facebook picks the relevant information from the website that the post links to.

This article presents a solution to continue to post customizable post previews for certain contexts.

Facebook takes action to fight fake news

To fight misleading posts with false preview texts and misleading images,  Facebook has started to disable the ability for Pages to edit the previews of the links they post – both for the Page composer and the API.

Says Facebook (July 18, 2017):

By removing the ability to alter link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) from all link sharing entry points on Facebook, we are eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news. (…) Specifically all API versions will no longer support this capability, and Page admins will no longer be able to make these edits in Page composer. (source)

Now I’ve been doing exactly that with Jazzity: Everyday a cron job would run a script that took a few snippets from a data base and post them to Facebook using the API:

postPicture($post_message, $post_link, $post_picture, $post_name, $post_caption, $post_description);

The function postPicture (we’ll go into more details later) would take six parameters, which will make up the post as follows:

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Introducing Jazzity – Your pocket guide to jazz in Berlin

A while ago I moved to Berlin. Being a huge fan of live jazz music I was really excited to move to the jazz capital of Europe, as Berlin is frequently called.

Berlin has a lot of amazing jazz clubs, from well-known and established jazz clubs such as the A-Trane, the b-flat or the Quasimodo, to smaller and less well known clubs such as the Donau 115, the Hangar 49 or the Hat Bar.

I quickly came to realize, however, that there was no good overview of all jazz clubs in Berlin. There was no convenient way to know which club was playing what and when, or when there were jam sessions at which club. I decided to change that.

Enter Jazzity.

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