NewsCorpse

Hey Richard, did you get my last post? Looking forward to your response.

Hi Richard. Sorry for the late response. Holidays, ya know. As for your questions…

1) The way I used the Media Manager was simply to click on the button in the post editor. The Media Manager came up, and I clicked the upload link. If I want to store the file in a particular folder, I will change the upload folder first in the Media Settings page.

2) I checked my config file and there is no define call that says “upload.”

3) I did disable the WP Easy Uploader plugin for testing, and it made no difference. I have since re-enabled it. My other plugins are:

AddThis Social Bookmarking
Akismet
Comment Form Quicktags
Similar Posts
Simple Trackback Validation
Stop SOPA Ribbon (which I’ve modified to be a ribbon advertising my book “Fox Nation vs. Reality.”) I have also disabled this plugin for testing.

I have recently noticed that if I publish a post without the Jetpack/Publicize Facebook box checked, then paste the post’s url into the Facebook debug utility, then manually post the article on Facebook, the correct image appears.

Another update:

I modified my theme to use “featured images” to see if that would would have any effect. Every post I’ve Ive done since then used the wrong image.

??????

An Update:

Since that first example using the WP Media Manager, I have done it a couple more times with mixed results. One time it used the the wrong image again from somewhere else on my page, rather than from the article. The next time there were two images in the article and it used the second one rather than the first. But at least it was from the article.

I’m confused.

p.s. Jetpack also just started adding the URL shortcode to the custom message.

Both addresses resolve to the same place, which where the file physically resides:
https://www.newscorpse.com/Pix/Charts/congress-media-approval.jpg

It’s just that the one that is working goes a longer distance. By that I mean it points first to…
https://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/ then the two dots point back to…
https://www.newscorpse.com/ then the remainder is added…
Pix/Charts/congress-media-approval.jpg

So the result is the same. I’m thinking that by first pointing to the folder that is the home folder of my blog (ncWP), it may be recognizing something there that makes it work properly. But that’s just a guess, and I’m not sure why it wouldn’t work with an absolute URL.

Hey, I just tried something.

Previously I used absolute paths to my images that look like this:
https://www.newscorpse.com/Pix/Humor/roger-ailes-fox.jpg

Today I used the WP Media Manager which used a path that looks like this:
https://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/../Pix/Charts/congress-media-approval.jpg

It Worked! I don’t know why. The dots in the path regress to the folder where I store my images, from the folder where my blog is.

I have only done this once so I’m withholding judgment until I see it work a few more times. But I thought I’d pass it along to you in case it gave you any ideas.

The incorrect image it usually uses is “facebook.png” but sometimes it’s different.

One thing I thought of — You once speculated that there might be a problem because I don’t use WP’s default folder structure. If Jetpack is sending a path to the image that hard codes it under the “wp-content” folder, that could cause it to miss the correct image.

Hey Richard,

I posted a new article today and accessed my logs. I cut a portion that appeared to be the section around the time of the posting and put in pastebin here: https://pastebin.com/YVjavg1d

I really can’t see anything in there that has any relevance to this, but you’re the expert, not me. let me know if you find anything or need additional info.

Richard,

I’ve been using the uploading plugin simply because it works. All it does is an FTP upload of the file. Since that worked, I’ve been lazy about exploring the WP Media Manager, however, I just did so and that works too, so I’ll start using it. (One thing I don’t like is that it makes every image a link. Can that be turned off? Also, it would be nice if I could designate the upload directory before the file is uploaded) But I can’t see how that will affect any of this.

Nevertheless, I’ll let you know when I’ve published a new article using this method. And I look forward to your letting me know what to look for in my log file.

Hope you had a nice retreat. Now get back to work. ??
OK, let me try to answer your questions:

1) I searched my logs for anything that might indicate a Facebook crawler but didn’t see something that was obvious. Perhaps you know what the crawler is called in the logs so I can search for that. I did see this:

“facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+https://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)”

But that just appears to be how Facebook gets data when another Facebook user shares a link to my content.

2) How did you modify the upload path?
I change the upload path in the “Media Settings” section of the WP Admin. Then I upload the file with a plugin called “WP Easy Uploader.” Otherwise the publishing step-by-step is exactly the way you wrote above.

My previous description of having to either manually post a 2nd time or wait for a while is very consistent. Maybe there is something you can do to send Facebook a sort of probe first to trigger something, and then when sending the real post data it would publish correctly. Does that make any sense?

Richard,

With regard to logs, I’m not sure about what to send. I looked at some logs from my web host, but they don’t seem to have any relevant info. And they are HUGE. Can you tell me what you might be looking for? I’m a little nervous about sending all that raw data.

As for the image URLs, I do have my own folders for images. But why would that matter? The system should look wherever I point it to. The Facebook debugger seems to find them OK. It’s just that they don’t post to Facebook properly. All I do to publish is insert the IMG SRC in the post where I want it via the quicktags link button. I hope that Jetpack isn’t assuming that every user is putting their images in wp/content.

And I think I mentioned before that there appears to be a time delay. When I post to Facebook manually right after I publish on my site, it does not use the correct image. But if I delete that and then post manually again, it DOES use the correct image. Also, a couple of times I waited about half a hour after publishing on my site before manually posting to Facebook. In those cases it used the correct image the first time.

So let me know if there is something I can look for in the logs. Also, do you still need any info from my test post? I would like to delete it.

Richard, I just wanted to make sure you saw my previous comment. The test post is still available, but I intend to remove it soon.

This time it used the Facebook button in the top right corner of my page. Sometimes it uses the little banner that says “Fox Nation vs. Reality” also in the top right corner of my page.

Hey, you know what I just realized as I was typing this? Both of those images are much smaller than the 200px minimum. Hmmm…

I just posted a test article and it used the banner image. I’ll leave it there for an hour or so, unless you ask me to leave it longer. But I’d like to delete ASAP because it messes up my page.
It is at https://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=10818 on my site
It is at https://www.facebook.com/NewsCorpse/posts/745007372180727 on Facebook.

I also noticed that it appended the shortlink to the headline, which it did not do before.

I just posted a new article on my website and it did not post correctly to Facebook. The image it used was some other image on my page, not the one in the article.

I deleted that post on Facebook and re-posted it manually and it worked. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you diagnose this, because I can reproduce the problem with 100% certainty.

Was something done to fix Jetpack, or are you determining this by the fact that my images are showing on Facebook? Because I have been posting manually – not with Jetpack – and that’s why my images are showing. I tried a post with Jetpack a few days ago and it still did not work.