Facebook Fanbox streams may stop working if you merge your FB page with a place or places

A possible fix if your Facebook Fanbox stream has stopped working and you have merged your Facebook Page with a Place or Places. This method worked for me, and was also used successfully by a page admin who reported it here.

http://www.facebook.com/unmerge


Simply unmerge your Facebook page from the Facebook places it was merged to. You should be able to do this using the Unmerge with Places link on your Facebook Page.

Don't Try To Call Facebook

I tried to telephone Facebook to maybe speak with a human about the Fan Box issue. Ha. No matter which option I chose a recorded voice referred me to an email address. This is a company that is being valued in the private market at many billions of dollars?? What a joke.

Integrating Facebook social apps into your website puts you at the mercy of Facebook

Some time ago we did a web site redesign. As part of the redesign we decided to incorporate a Facebook fanbox on the home page. We enabled streaming in the Facebook Fanbox so that anything posted on the organization's Facebook page wall would also appear on the homepage. While I was not deeply involved in that part of the decision making, I believe the idea was to keep things fresh and interesting on the home page and increase traffic between the organization's Facebook presence and web site. Mysteriously today the Facebook stream on the home page isn't loading. Empty box. So far no luck in tracking down the problem. Facebook has a developer forum but no formal help system to speak of, and the admittedly small sample of Facebook documentation I've used has been so so.

My experience with Facebook so far has been mixed, and this is one instance of why I don't have particularly warm feelings towards the company. Let me jump back a couple of months. A sister organization of the one I work for, which also has a presence on the same web site, asked me to do a Facebook Fan Box for them as well. When I went to generate the Fan Box code, surprise surprise, Facebook was no longer supporting Fan Boxes. They'd changed them to "Like" Boxes, and what's more they'd removed access to the documentation for Fan Boxes. Indeed it seemed as if the company tried to expunge all references to Fan Boxes. So much for supporting features that they themselves created.

This is apparently what the company means in its user agreement when it says things can change at any time and there is squat the user can do about it. Fair enough. Thing is the only reason Facebook exists is because people and developers use it. When Facebook yanks support for its own features, buries documentation, can't be bothered to help developers track problems, and the like it says to me that I need to be careful in buying in to their system.

Getting searchd to run in Sphinx

Yesterday I tried to run searchd in Sphinx. To run searchd you use the ./searchd command and give it a path to your sphinx.conf file.

On the command line I wrote:

./searchd --config=/directory/to/config/file/sphinx.conf

The result was a message that looked very much like this.

using config file '/sphinx/conf/sphinx.conf'...
listening on all interfaces, port=9312
bind() failed on 0.0.0.0, retrying...
bind() failed on 0.0.0.0, retrying...
bind() failed on 0.0.0.0, retrying...
bind() failed on 0.0.0.0, retrying...
bind() failed on 0.0.0.0, retrying...
bind() failed on 0.0.0.0, retrying...

A fatal error ensued. This morning after a second consult of the Sphinx forum, the problem was clarified. The Sphinx searchd program cannot be activated using the --config=// syntax. The correct syntax is ./searchd -c /path/to/conf/file/sphinx.conf

Once I wrote:

./searchd -c /directory/to/config/file/sphinx.conf

It worked.

In Sphinx the correct syntax for starting the search daemon differs from the correct syntax for running the indexer.

In the case of the indexer you use the --config=// syntax.

In the case of searchd you use -c // syntax.

Not sure why Sphinx was designed this way.