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Extended Info

Help/FAQ

General

Do you have any suggestions for field titles? What types of fields should I create?
You should check our Top Choices page, which lists the top 50 regular field titles and category names. But if that’s still not enough, listen to what our users are saying. There are many user-submitted ideas in our old group forum. Of course, feel free to “think outside of the box.” You might use such field titles as: Favorite Sports Teams, Fashion, Favorite Cuisines, Languages Spoken, Type of Humor, Favorite Magazines, Turn Ons/Offs, Likes/Dislikes, Extended Political Views, Favorite Albums, Projects I’m Working On, Role Models, Cities I’ve Traveled To, Favorite Websites, Passions, Music Genres.
What’s new in Extended Info 2.0?
A lot of things based on a year of user feedback:
  • The introduction of different field types, designed to help people so they don’t need to enter messy FBML code. Let Extended Info format it for you.
    • Regular
    • Regular (without links)
    • Category
    • Tags
    • New: List — use this with the Live checkbox unchecked, and you’ve got a private to-do list
    • New: Video
    • New: Image
    • New: FBML Block — when you just want to put a block of FBML in your profile, without a title to the left
    • New: Lightweight Markup — for those familiar with the Markdown and Textile formatting systems
    • More coming soon
  • Ability to save to your profile’s Info tab
  • When you save your changes, you will be prompted as to which story size you prefer for display in your News Feed.
  • Media (video, music, images) added to fields will now be sent to your News Feed (if you choose to save to the News Feed). Your friends can see images and play new videos right in your News Feed.
  • The editor now has buttons to delete and move fields, so you don’t need to do it manually.
  • The new live checkbox gives you the option of taking fields off of your profile (and news feed, search, top fields, and relevant locations). This helps if you want to temporarily take a field offline without completely deleting it, either because you might update it later, or because it’s for your eyes only.
  • Support for full FBML and tag attributes, not just a select few
  • Introduction of Tools, which are not related to your Extended Info, but will help manage Facebook in ways not currently available
  • A new preference to show what you’ve removed from your Extended Info (disabled by default) in your News Feed
  • Support for video sites now includes YouTube and Google Video like before, but also Vimeo and Hulu
  • A completely re-written backend, which means Extended Info is over ten times faster than before
  • A width value of fullwidth and fullwidth*n (where n is a number) to automatically size your media based on where it is in the profile. More information coming soon.
  • Smarter auto-linking doesn’t require links to be separated by spaces

Field Features

How can I move a field?
There are links on the right of every field to move the field up or down. Currently, there is only support to move them one at a time, but we are hoping to implement drag and drop in the future.
How can I take a field off of my profile without deleting it? What does the live checkbox do?
The live checkbox prevents a field from appearing in your profile and News Feed. It’s useful if you want to temporarily take a field offline, or save one you think you might want to restore later. It’s also useful for making something private, like a “to do” list or a “note to self.”
How can I convert my Regular (linked) field to a Regular (unlinked) field, or vice versa?
Currently, there is no one-button solution to this, but it’s really not much work. Just create a new field and then cut/paste the content from the old field to the new one.
Yes, a special tag called <nolink /> was created for this purpose. Any block of text that would normally be a link can be unlinked by inserting the <nolink /> anywhere in it. Other links in this field will still be linked normally.
Note: like all tag support, we require proper closing of this tag. Without the ending / (slash), this tag will not work.

Preferences

Can I make the checkbox to include this save in my News Feed disabled by default?
Yep. It’s an option on the preferences page.
I don’t see Extended Info in my profile. Where is it? How do I move it?

Make sure you’ve added it, first. Once you’ve saved some info, a button labeled “Add to Profile” will appear near the top. Clicking it will tell you about your options to add it to your profile.

To move the box between the Wall tab and the Boxes tab, just click the pencil icon on the box in your profile, and you will notice an option to change its location.

HTML/FBML

What HTML can I use? Why can’t I use all the usual HTML?
Facebook restricts applications to using a proprietary subset of HTML called FBML. It allows most of the commonly used HTML tags, but disallows some occasionally used ones such as <embed>. For these, you may try using FBML tags, or try using our media field types, such as Video and Image, which will take care of the code for you.
What are the special media tags I can use?

Extended Info has a few special tags that are not part of regular FBML. It is usually easier to use the special media field types to put media into your profile. However, in fields where media tags are supported, you can use the following:

  • Videos: In order to use this, you should not simply paste the <embed> code into your content. We felt that this amount of code was bulky, and made editing your Extended Info unreadable. In order to support video, we have a custom tag called <video>. To use it, place a video URL inside of a <video> tag. This URL can be found in the address bar at the top of your browser, or on YouTube to the right of the video. Simply put <video> in front of the URL, and </video> behind it. Some examples of how to use the video tag:
    <video>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5FIrcj5HRY</video>
    <video>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1734854694879808328</video>
    <video>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1734854694879808328&q=fungi&total=486
    &start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1    </video>
  • MP3: Similar to the <video> tag, there is also an <mp3> tag. Just put the URL of an mp3 inside the tag, and you’ll magically have a little music player in your Extended Info. (Unfortunately, Facebook won’t allow other audio formats yet.) You can optionally set the artist, song title, and album using the attributes artist, title, and album. For example:
    <mp3 artist="Tycho" title="The Disconnect" album="Past Is Prologue">http://tychomusic.com/mp3/clips/tycho-disconnect-clip.mp3</mp3>
  • Images: Use the normal HTML/XHTML/FBML <img> tag. The SRC is the full path to the image (the URL), which is usually provided by most image hosting services. If you’ve found an image online you want to use, you can find the SRC in most browsers by right clicking an image online and going to Properties. Then, highlight the Address (or in Firefox, Location), right click, and copy. Some examples:
    <img src="http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif" width="255" title="Google Logo" />
    <img src="http://www.treyp.com/img/logo.gif">
    Krishanu humping Ben’s car:
    <img src="http://photos-008.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll-sf2p/v10/85/44/7900008/n7900008_1463242_513.jpg" title="Oh, Krishanu" width="255" />
    If you want to put it in a link, just drop it inside a link tag:
    <a href="http://www.google.com"><img src="http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif" /></a>
I used an <img> tag, but it’s not working.

The most common reason your image tag is not working is because of space characters in the image SRC. Try replacing all instances of %20 in the SRC with a space character. For example, if your image is:
<img src="http://example.com/test%20image%20src.jpg" />
try changing it to:
<img src="http://example.com/test image src.jpg" />

Another problem that occasionally comes up is permissions. Some web hosts do not allow referrals or the Facebook servers to grab your image. Try hosting your image on a different server.

Lastly, if you uploaded an image a long time ago and it’s not updating, this is because Facebook uses a special caching mechanism. You will need to either use a new filename/SRC, or you can use a “cache breaker” — try adding a random query string on the end of the image. For example, on the end of the SRC, add a question mark and some characters:
http://example.com/image.jpg?200907
Then, save your changes.

Where can I upload my image to use in this application?
Currently, we don’t host any images. You will need to host them on your own web server, or use a free image hosting service. We recommend trying: tinypic, ImageShack, and Flickr.
How can I change the font of a field?

Using standard HTML/XHTML and CSS, you can change the font of a field. (We’re hoping to make this easier for people in the future so that no code is needed.) If you are new to this, try reading the About.com article “Changing Font Attributes”. You might be able to pick up the basics from these examples:

I love reading Clifford.
I love reading <span style="color: red; font-size: 18px;">Clifford</span>.
Maybe Facebook should ban Comic Sans.
Maybe Facebook should ban <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS'">Comic Sans</span>.

Other CSS properties that can go inside the style="" attribute are listed at W3Schools’ CSS Font Properties page. You can also use the CSS Font and Text Style Wizard, which will generate the code for you.

The Future

I have an idea to improve Extended Info! What do you think?
There are lots of ideas in the works. Check the Feature Suggestions thread on our Page, and add yours if you don’t already see it. It will then be put in a reality TV show with other ideas, and only one will be chosen… kinda.
Where can I profess my love for this great application?
We thought you’d never ask. Tell your friends, or, post a review on Extended Info’s Page.

Something Didn’t Work / Troubleshooting

Everything is displayed as linked text on the Info tab. What’s wrong?
Unfortunately, Facebook places strict limitations on what type of content can go in your Info tab. These are the reason we suggest putting Extended Info in its own tab, where it will work normally. When you click “Add to profile” in Extended Info, you will see the list of known limitations:
  • Basically, everything will come out as linked text.
  • FBML and media are not supported. We will convert these to text in the best way possible.
  • The Category field type is not supported.
  • This application will go at the bottom of the Info tab and cannot be moved around.
  • The edit link inside the Info tab does not work.
  • In the Regular field type, semicolons and line returns (“enter”) will be replaced with commas.
I ran into a problem/error/bug. What should I do?
Panic! No, actually, first, you might try saving your Extended Info again by hitting "Save changes" on the Extended Info page. If that doesn’t help, submit a bug report by sending Trey a message.