advertising

Here are a few tips on how to use OpenAds to manage the advertising you are displaying on Facebook.  Note: This is not an article about Lookery.

OpenAds is actually pretty simple to use to manage the ads in your Facebook Application.  There are a few obstacles that aren't immediately obvious.

1) Facebook uses FBML, facebooks own flavour of HTML.  Some usual HTML tags have been stripped out.  The standard javascript invocation code that OpenAds spits out doesn't work (well at least it doesn't for me).   For this reason you need to use local mode invocation - and that means that you need to host your Facebook application on the same server as OpenAds

2) Trying to change the invocation mode to Local Mode can be problematic when using servers that have mod_security installed.  Add this little snippet of code to your .htaccess file to get around the problem:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SECFILTERENGINE OFF
SECFILTERSCANPOST OFF
</IfModule>

If you are uncomfortable with removing a layer of security from your site, you remove the lines immediately after you change the mode.

3)  If you are using a different subdomain for your application as you are for your openads installation ( eg, facebook.example.com, and ads.example.com ) then you need to make another copy of your config file found in the /var/ directory of your OpenAds installation.

So, if you have ads.example.com.conf.php, you will need to create another file called facebook.example.com.conf.php

Remember this only works if your facebook application is on the same server as your openads installation.