Tag Archives: facebook

General, Technical

oEmbeds Stopped Working: adapting to the new Instagram/Facebook API

What a mess. Just found out that WordPress no longer supports Facebook Instagram oEmbeds, which essentially breaks the format of single Instagram posts on my other sites.

Unfortunately using a plug-in such as Smash Balloon Social Photo Feeds is causing me some grief due to a reliance on Facebook’s API. Already Facebook, unknown to me, locked my account for suspicious activity. (I have a 30 day old account, to use on Messenger and one group.) Then when I finally resolved that issue, Smash Balloon still insists on setting up a Facebook business page to allow for unlimited tokens. So much for staying off Facebook.

Finally, once I took care of the token I just had to repost some of the Instagram posts that were affected; Smash Balloon took care of the rest.

On a side note can you believe WordPress is on version 5.x? It’s come a long way since I first started using it over a decade ago. Also PHP just released version 8, but I guess WordPress is not ready for it yet…so for now, my sites are/will be running 7.4.

I still have to troubleshoot site health issues with my garden blog. I thought hosting on Linode would improve my site’s performance. I’m not sure sharing a database on AWS with my main site is causing the problem. More on that later.

Oh and another inconvenience is using the WordPress app on my my phone. I have to turn off Google VPN to access my self-hosted WordPress sites. It’s becoming quite a chore to disable it while trying to write a post.

Technical

Plugin hassles

I’ve been test-driving some social networking plugins such as Lifestream and the Facebook Dashboard Widget, and I’ve come to the conclusion that some of these things are just too user-unfriendly. As much as I like Lifestream, it appears that Facebook closed their API so that I can’t grab my status feeds from them. What does this mean? Well, it’s not the plugin’s fault that a well-known social networking site decided to shut off public access to feeds. But given that it is one of a few sites that I regularly check up on, would it be too much trouble to have an RSS feed work from it? At this point, I’m thinking I should just use blog RSS feeds, such as the one by Blogger, or a proprietary widget, from MySpace for example, to fill my sidebar.

Lifestream doesn’t work actually, it just fails to reload my dashboard page whenever I attempt to add a feed, so I’ve dropped it.

I found another annoyance: it seems that the newest Sidebar Login plugin is wreaking havoc with my sidebar formatting. I’ve rolled back to 2.1.7 to correct the issue, since I don’t have time right now to root around the code to fix it. Besides that, I dislike the gravatar image that was added in 2.2.1. It would be more appropriate in a personal site, but seems out of place in a multi-user portal site.