Why are the links in my blog not working on FB and Twitter?
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The links in my blog today come up as blank pages when people try to open them on Facebook and Twitter, though they work if you go directly to my site (The-Wonderist). Do you know what would be causing that, so I can fix it? All of my other posts have linked correctly, so I’m not sure what’s going on!
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Hi there,
That’s very strange! Could you send me a link to your Twitter post so I can see this happen for myself?
Thanks!
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Hi! Sorry I didn’t actually explain that very well – the link to my blog and the links within the posts work on a computer but not on smart phones.
When my readers try to click links within my posts on their iPhones via twitter and Facebook, they get blank pages. To check that out, my twitter name is thewonderist and the post it isn’t working on is from today called “Junk Drawer.” Thanks! -
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Please note the links work if you open the blog in a web browser on a phone but NOT if you try to open them within the twitter and Facebook frameworks.
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Hi there,
Sorry it took me a while to get back to you, I was out over the weekend!
I used my own iPhone to load up the Twitter app, go to your twitter handle, and then find the tweet which you mentioned. I followed the link, and it loaded OK for me. Here’s a screenshot of it loaded on my phone:
To double check I also made sure that it would load both on a 3G (cellular network) and Wifi signal, and it did just fine.
Are you, or do you know if your readers are still having problems loading up that page? Also, is it only that page or are other pages presenting a problem as well?
Thanks for any additional information which you can provide!
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Hi, there,
Oh gosh – no problem! I wasn’t sure how customer service worked – apologies for being such a nag!
It’s not the blog home page that won’t load, it’s the links within the blog…So, for example, the Junk Drawer post you pulled up on your phone – if you scroll down to the 10 links to outside material I included in the post and click on them, each one will pull up a blank page (at least it does for the rest of us!), instead of going to the linked site.
I checked with another friend who hosts her blog on WordPress and was able to view internal links in her posts just fine on FB and Twitter via my phone, so it seems like a problem unique to me. Wah wahhhh.
Can you help?
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Heya!
Thanks for the additional information! With that, I’ve been doing a lot of test tweets and posts, and as a result it appears to be a very isolated incident!
I was able to replicate what you described (with the blank page), but I’ve not been able to make things error out in the same way no matter what I try, across several different accounts!
I thought that it might be something wrong with the code ‘target=”_blank”‘ (which is the direction to open a link in a new tab), however using a different variation does not work either. If I fully remove the “target” argument, it makes the links work just fine!
I also took a look at one of your previous posts (“One in a Million: Finding Polaris”), and the links from that one works great as well, despite having the exact same code.
So to make a long story short, it seems that something has gone sideways with this post. You’ve got a couple of options:
* I can duplicate the entry and see if that one has the same problems (it could just be a glitch!).
* I can leave the links how they are. You can’t open them in the Twitter app, but that’s a relatively small portion of the population, and the tweet was 48 hours ago now.
* I can modify all of the links so they open in the same page so it will work in the Twitter app, but that increases the odds of people leaving your site.
Let me know what you’d like me to do!
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Hi there – thanks for all of this work! It doesn’t seem to be completely isolated tho – the links in today’s post (Neighborday) don’t work either…suggestions for a long-term solution? Something I should be doing differently?
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Hmmmmm.
How are you composing your posts? Do you do it entirely in the editor, or do you compose them somewhere else and then copy/paste them in to the editor? The same goes for the links. Do you copy them from location bars in a browser somewhere, or a list you have, or do you type them in manually?
Feel free to run me through your process . . .
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A little bit of both – sometimes I’m copying links straight from a browser and sometimes from a link list I keep.
Is one or the other better? The info is the same but maybe it matters? -
Yes, it can matter. Any time you can, it’s best to make sure you’re writing things directly in to the editor directly or that you are copy/pasting from a plain text editor (a plain text editor is one in which you cannot format text, such as making it bold/italics/etc. So basically NOT MS Word or OpenWord, etc). This is because there’s all sorts of nasty stuff which is attached to it as it goes in which can mess with seemingly normal links.
If you compose or keep your lists in such an editor, we have special windows into which you can paste your contents which will strip any formatting:
The only other thing which I can possibly think might be making issues for you might be your theme. We don’t like changing people’s themes for testing without permission, so if you’d like to try changing your theme at some point and seeing if that resolves the issue, please do and let me know! Go to a really basic one such as TwentyTen (which rarely if ever causes problems and has been very extensively tested).
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You are a genius – plain and simple. I followed your advice re: not copying and pasting from Word and all the links work perfectly. Thank you SO MUCH for hanging in there with me and figuring this out!!!
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YESSSS!!
I’m thrilled to hear it! This one has been bugging me a lot, so I’m really glad to hear that you were able to figure it out (and that you let me know what it was!).
I hope you have a fantastic week, and thanks again!
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