Man, tricky computer problems are both what makes being a computer guy fun, and also what makes it so frustrating.
Today’s issue — well, today’s and yesterday’s issue– was a tricky bug where when I tried to share a post from my WordPress blog to Facebook, it was giving me a 404 File Not Found error.
The weird part was that the page was visible. Going to it directly worked just fine, and I was able to share the page the page to other social media platforms like Mix or MeWe, but not to Twitter.
Facebook Redirecting On WordPress Share
If you’re pages and websites don’t behave as expected when you shart them into Facebook, there is a developer debug page that you can use where Facebook shows you exactly what is happening when you share a link to them.
Is Rakuten legit – find out with this Rakuten review.
Mine showed a redirect that was being applied to Facebook posts, but not to any other access.
Fixing Facebook Redirect Problem
So, obviously, the issue is that there is an unintentional redirect.
Not so obvious was where that redirect was coming from. This particular personal finance information website of mine is over 10-years old, and I’ve tried a lot of things along the way, and installed and uninstalled a lot of plugins. The collateral damage could be high.
I dug through my redirect plugin, which did not seem to be the problem. I went through my Rank Math Pro plugin, which is new to me, but couldn’t find a setting on it that caused any issues either.
Finally I checked the SSL plugin I was using and it had some options checked that said only to check them if there was no access to the .htaccess file. Since I have access, I unchecked those settings, and lo, it worked.
I’m back in business after spending too many hours working the problem.
Now it says this:
Missing Properties: The following required properties are missing: fb:app_id
For now, that doesn’t seem to have any real effect on my site or its sharing or linking, so that goes on the list for fixing another day; it’s a long list. Another day, another issue.
Still, it is all worth it in the end as I work to transition from professional freelance writer, to financially independent writer.