Monthly Archives: June 2012

Facebook users are still figuring out that most of the posts from your Pages never appear in your news feed. But there is a work-around. Here's how to subscribe to an Interest List to make sure you never miss important Social Fixer posts.

First, go directly to the Public List I have created, called "Social Fixer News":
https://www.facebook.com/lists/10150970104052276

This list contains posts by only one Page – Social Fixer. When you view the list, it will show you all recent posts just from the Page, so you won't miss important announcements about changes, new features, etc.

At the top, find the "Subscribe" button and click it. This will add the list to your left sidebar, probably at the bottom. (You may have to click the "more" link to find "Interests", depending on how many things you already have in your left sidebar)

Hover over the list, and an edit icon will appear to the left. Click it, and this menu appears:

Click the "Add to Favorites" item, and this will bring the list to the upper part of the left column, where it will always be visible, as shown to the left.

The number to the right shows how many new posts have not been read. Clicking the "Social Fixer News" item will bring up a list of all recent posts from the Page, even if you never saw them in your news feed. The news feed filters content out and hides it from you based on their EdgeRank algorithm. Lists do not do this. Or at least not yet!

You can repeat the same process for other Pages or Friends, creating custom lists of your own. Then, you can always check the lists to see if there are any new posts that you haven't seen.

Hope this helps, and please check the posts, so you can be made aware of the useful information which I post every few days!

Extra Tip: If you want the count of new posts to show up in red to make sure you don't miss anything, enter this CSS in Options->Styles(CSS):
#navItem_fl_10150970104052276 .uiSideNavCount { background-color:red !important; color:white !important; }

-- Matt Kruse, Author of Social Fixer

You may have noticed recently that Facebook says you have more friends than you used to, and this number is higher than Social Fixer's Friend Tracker count. What happened? Here's the answer…

A number of people have confirmed (Mari Smith, WebProNews, etc) that Facebook now counts former friends with deactivated accounts in your friend count.

So if a friend deactivated their account a while ago, you never used to see them in your friend list or have them counted in your total. Now you do.

Apparently this is for two reasons:

1. So you can remove these friends from your friends list. This is so if they re-activate their account after a long absence, they won't suddenly start seeing your posts again when you thought you were no longer friends. Previously, you couldn't see them in your friends list, so there was no way to unfriend them.
2. Facebook says they can offer a faster experience by including them in the count. Who knows what that means. Maybe they can leave off an extra WHERE clause in their queries  

The Friend Tracker in Social Fixer will continue to show you the "correct" count of friends, and not include the deactivated accounts. The discrepancy between the two numbers isn't an error – they just count different things.

-- Matt Kruse, Author of Social Fixer

Some of us have the insatiable desire to build. To create. To assemble. To hook together existing things in new ways that haven't been done before. And while we work hard to perfect whatever it is our project turns out to be, it is always made possible by the great work of others from which we can build.

"If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." – Isaac Newton (paraphrased)

Here are some of the tools I use when developing Social Fixer, which I think deserve recognition. And keeping with my philosophy of supporting independent developers such as myself, I have purchased or donated to support each of them!

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows developers to insert scripts into web sites to run their custom code. This is the very core of Social Fixer. It began as a simple Greasemonkey script, and I later created tools to translate that script into native extensions for other browsers. But I develop the code using Greasemonkey, and without it, Social Fixer could not exist. Big kudos to the developers of Greasemonkey, who do this in their spare time, just because they enjoy it.

Firebug

This Firefox extension provides fantastic debugging capabilities within Firefox. With it I can inspect the CSS applied to elements, trace through Javascript code to debug it, see all the ajax requests that are being made, and more. Like Greasemonkey, I simply couldn't create Social Fixer without it.

Sublime Text

There are lots of editors out there, and I've probably tried most of them. Previously, I was using Notepad++ for my development (and still do for some things), but I recently switched to Sublime Text and I'm not looking back. It has a ton of fantastic features and customization options. One of the key features I love is that if I close it down with unsaved changes to files (or even new files that have never been saved), it preserves them for when I open it back up. I can drop things into new tabs and keep notes without having to worry about saving files or losing what I was working on. I love it.

Radian

I had used Circle Dock for quite a while as a quick-launcher in Windows, but it just wasn't as convenient as I wanted. So I was very happy to find Radian through a Lifehacker article. It does everything I want, and does it well. I use it to quickly launch the apps I use, as well as to quickly fire off my packaging scripts that build the extensions. When I don't have it, I find myself lost, not remembering how to start the apps that I use many times every day!

JS Deminifier

I just found this add-on a couple days ago, and my life got so much easier. Facebook's Javascript code is minified, making it unreadable in Firebug. Also, since entire components are on one line in the source, I can't step through the debugger line by line to see what their code is doing. JS Deminifier automatically un-minifies their Javascript code before it hits the browser, so Firebug sees it in fully expanded, readable, formatted text. This makes my Javascript debugging and reverse-engineering so much easier.

JS Beautifier

This is a web site that will take mangled, ugly Javascript or HTML and format it to be readable. I've used it so many times over the last few years that I've made several donations to the site's maintainer. Though the newly-discovered JS Deminifier add-on will reduce my dependency on this site a bit, I still use it for chunks of HTML that I pull out of Facebook, or pieces of script that JS Deminifer won't handle. It's absolutely an essential tool for me.

If you're a developer, I hope you check out some of these great tools, and possibly include them in your toolbox too!

-- Matt Kruse, Creator of Social Fixer

Users click "Like" literally billions of times per day, but most don't understand how that can trigger stories to show up in their friends' newsfeeds. You may be a Like-spammer and not even know it!

How Are Your Likes Used?

Here are some of the ways that clicking "Like" can be used in ways you don't realize:

1. If you "Like" a product on Amazon or other site connected to Facebook, or even if you just Like a post made by a product you are a fan of, you may actually show up in an ad for that company! Facebook may show an ad to your friends, telling them that you liked a product. See this story on the New York Times: On Facebook, Likes Become Ads. Read this story!
2. If you "Like" a Sponsored story from Target or any other Page you like (sponsored stories are Facebook's new con to earn revenue), that story may appear in your friends' news feeds, even if they don't like the Page! You are effectively passing on their ad to your friends.
3. If you "Like" something posted by a friend, and that post's privacy is set to "Public" or "Friend of Friends", your friends who don't even know this other friend may see the story in their feed that you liked their post.
4. If you "Like" something posted by a friend, and you both have a mutual friend, that mutual friend may see a story in their news feed that you liked their post.

For these reasons, I have personally decided to limit my activity with Facebook. I rarely "Like" or comment on posts anymore, because there is simply no way to interact with Facebook without potentially spamming your every move to your friends' news feeds, or appearing in ads.

For all of Facebook's attempts at privacy, they have failed on one of the biggest privacy concerns – I don't want my every click on Facebook to be broadcast to my friends! This new kind of Social Voyeurism is not welcome by me, or many others.

Facebook, if you want people to interact more with the site, you need to give us greater control over how "spammy" we are to our friends, and let us Like and Comment without fearing that our every word or click will be broadcast for all to see.

Of course, please click "Like" on this post. It may show up in your friends' news feeds, but that would be a good thing. Maybe they will read it

-- Matt Kruse, author of Social Fixer.