Obviously it wasn’t affecting everyone or else you’d have tons of websites complaining. I had sent in a bug report as well as contacted my friend who works at Facebook who forwarded my issue to the appropriate department, but I never heard back.

I’m happy to announce that the problem has been fixed. I took some time this weekend to investigate the issue and found out it was related to the open graph changes I made in the middle of November. It turns out that if you include og:tags, the like button behaves differently. When I removed the og:tags from the site, the likes were incrementing correctly and even showing the previous like count.

After a bit of searching I landed on this page: Open Graph Protocol on Facebook. The real useful thing was the Facebook URL Linter, a debug tool to show you what Facebook sees when it parses your website. It turns out I was missing fb:admins or fb:app_id from my meta properties. After adding the app id (which you can register for one here), things started working again.

Another really useful trick I learned was that you can force Facebook to clear its cache and re-parse your page by using the Facebook URL Linter tool. Sometimes Facebook fails to fetch your thumbnail or if you decide to change the title/description, new people liking your page will still get the old data. But if you run your page through that debug tool, it’ll refresh.

Hope this helps anyone else who’s hitting a similar issue!

Anyway, I decided that this new video was worth blogging about and sharing with all you folks out there:

Sintel

“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.

www.sintel.org

You can find the download links on their website: Sintel – Open Movie Project, which includes DivX, MP4 Surround 5.1, MP4 Stereo, and OGV Stereo.

They even provided subtitles in 8 different languages.

Enjoy!

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Some of you may have already noticed. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made a bunch of changes to the site. The most noticeable change is probably the removal of a bunch of ads. We’ve also switched from using Project Wonderful to Google Ads. Yes, we’ve switched over to the Evil Empire.

Another change is that our Trailer Library (previously known as All Trailers) when in text mode is displayed in 1 column with no line-wrapping (previously 4 columns). We feel that this design feels neater and much more easier to scroll through to find the movie you want. We’ll probably group them by first letter some time down the road, but for now, this should suffice.

On our individual movie pages, you’ll notice we’ve added 3 new buttons into what we’re calling the control panel. Currently we only have a Play Latest Trailer button, Share on Twitter button, and Share on Facebook button. We have some ideas of what else to add to the control panel later. If you have any ideas, feel free to submit them to the feedback panel by clicking on the feedback on the left.

One additional thing we’ve changed is we now split the trailers from the clips, an often requested change according to our feedback. The trailers and teasers will now show up grouped together followed by the clips grouped together.

We’d like to take this time to thank all our contributors as well as visitors. We appreciate the support you have for us. It would mean a lot to us if you would let your friends know about our site on Twitter, Facebook, or any other way you can think of!

Some of the things I’ve been contemplating about include:

• Features/Requests/Suggestions can be done via the discussion boards
• You can notify us of new trailers via our wall
• Posting whenever a really cool trailer is released

Initially I began importing the blog posts via RSS feed, but that really just sort of spammed the fan page. Plus we already have RSS and Twitter for that, and I didn’t want the fan page to become another status update. On Twitter, it’s more about fans communicating with us. On Facebook, fans can now interact with each other, which I think is pretty neat.

Let me hear some ideas!