How to Show an April Fool’s Day Message on Facebook Using FBML
Facebook has a piece of FBML code that can be used on a custom tab and will show a special message only on April Fool’s Day.
While it isn’t April Fool’s Day yet, I thought I would write about it now so you had time to prepare. ;-)
This tag is wrapped around whatever content you want to display on April Fool’s Day and will only appear on April 1st.
Since the message will only appear on that one day, there isn’t a good way to test that it is working properly. Facebook does, however, have a test console that you can use to test your code before it goes live.
The fbml tag is:
<fb:is-it-april-fools>April Fools message here</fb:is-it-april-fools>
The part that says “April Fools message here” is where you add the content that you want displayed on April Fool’s Day.
Who knew that Facebook even had a sense of humor …?
photo credit: Stijn Vogels
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March 18, 2010 at 7:01 am
Hi Kim, first time for me in your blog, thanks for this post, lol it’s funny and will definitely try it in facebook, greetings from Germany.
.-= Mrs Moody@video tutorial blog´s last blog ..Earn or Make money Online with a simple way =-.
March 18, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Hi – Thanks for visiting! It is funny :-)
March 18, 2010 at 8:39 am
hahahaha
YES!
March 18, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Hi Jim – What’s not to love about Mr T?
March 18, 2010 at 6:59 pm
Ah the power of the comma. It’s April, Fools. Who knew punctuation could be so funny. Thanks for the smile.
March 18, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Hi Dean – Thanks! I’m just glad I got the punctuation right – I’ve been having a rough week with typos …
March 19, 2010 at 2:02 pm
You just find stuff, don’t-cha. lol
Got your email; will respond ASAP.
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED: Theme Customization Part 3 – Banner Advertising NOT for Sale! =-.
March 19, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Hi Dennis – I have a google alert set up on Mr T ;-)
March 19, 2010 at 9:32 pm
What’s the expression, some things needn’t be made public…something like that. :-)
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED: Theme Customization Part 3 – Banner Advertising NOT for Sale! =-.
March 20, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Hi Kim
When I try and run the test, I get this message,
regardless of which browser I’m using
RUNTIME ERROR: FBML Error (line 1): unknown tag “fb:is-it-april-fools”
March 20, 2010 at 6:26 pm
Hi Gailene – Odd. I’m getting the same error too and didn’t when I tested it a couple of weeks ago. If they are no longer using a tag, they usually say it’s deprecated and there is no note about it on the developer’s site. Bummer.
As a side note, I was testing a different tag and kept getting a Flavor error – now I’m trying to figure out what that even means ;-)
March 21, 2010 at 4:05 am
Hi Kim,
This seems like to be an amazing Facebook trick. I would love to try this out on the 1st of April.
Thanks for introducing it.
March 22, 2010 at 10:55 am
Hi Rick – Hopefully it will work. Right now it’s throwing errors in the Facebook test console :(