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Facebook Help

Facebook Reduce Font Size, Use Shortcuts To Tackle It

November 5, 2010

Earlier this week Facebook reduced the font size on it site without informing anyone.

The reduced text size was noticeable in the news feed, causing many users to turn to Twitter to complain about it.

This change in the size of text is more of an experiment rather than a full-fledged update according to Facebook. It is not clear whether or when Facebook will change the font back to the original size, but given the high number of negative feedbacks regarding the change, we can expect Facebook to take measures soon.

Until the company changes the text back to their original size, here is a few keyboard shortcuts you can use:

1. To increase the font size – Press ctrl-plus, i.e. keep the ctrl key pressed and press the “+” key once, twice, or thrice until you get a suitable size.

2. To decrease the font size – press Ctrl-minus.

3. Press Ctrl-zero to go back to the original size (recently reduced size).

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Fews Ways To Counter The “FireSheep” Extension

October 26, 2010

This post is not very related to Facebook, but I believe it is worth sharing. In our last post, we share about the dangers of Firesheep, a Firefox extension, and as I shared, a lot of people have already downloaded it and are trying it out to check whether it is true, with an intention to hack, or just for fun.

If SSL encryption is used in all communication, the problem will be solved, but this is something that should be supported in the server side and that is not happening very fast. But, you can take the initiation and use extension that will force to use secure connection to the sites you always use like Facebook, Twitter, and Google etc and counter extensions like the Firesheep.

HTTPS Everywhere is one such extension that will force secure connection. You can get it here. Install it and restart Firefox and you are done.

The extension will force the use of https for connecting to popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, NY Times, Washington Post, WordPress, Google, and many others. You can also add more sites by writing your own redirection rules, which is easy to write.

fb httpseverywhere Fews Ways To Counter The FireSheep Extension

Another Firefox extension called Force-TLS also force sites to use secure connections and make it impossible for Firesheep extension to get hold of your cookies. You can get the extension here.

Here is how to use it.

1. Install the plugin/extension.

2. Go to “Tools” on your Firefox browser and click on “ForceTLS Configuration.”

fb ForceTLS 1 Fews Ways To Counter The FireSheep Extension

3. Enter the address of the websites that you want the extension to force secure connection.

fb ForceTLS 2 Fews Ways To Counter The FireSheep Extension

Both the extensions work well except for Amazon (only partial). HTTPS Everywhere upon installation protects your information while visiting most of the popular sites while Force-TLS relies on the sites you define. But, it is easier to define new sites for secure connection through Force-TLS.

Note: The extensions given above are only for Firefox browser only.

To know whether a secure connection is being done or not just look at the address bar of your browser. For example: Connecting to Facebook without SSL encryption will appear like this the image below,

fb fbinsecure Fews Ways To Counter The FireSheep Extension

while connecting to Facebook after forcing encryption will appear like the one below.

fb fbsecure Fews Ways To Counter The FireSheep Extension

Note the extra ‘s’ after http at the beginning of the address. Hope this little post helps.

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Features Of The New Version Of Facebook Groups.

October 9, 2010

The new version of Groups announced by Facebook is making quite a lot of news. We have also cover about it earlier.

Getting added to different kind of groups without our permission can be quite frustrating and that is a down-side of the latest update on Groups. But, let’s have a look at the other offerings of the new Groups.

Facebook wants to provide a easy way to “build a space for important groups of people in [our] life”. These groups can be anything that is near to you like – family, close buddies, sports team, band, book club, or anything. All you have to do is create a group, add the related people and start sharing.

Groups will be a “Closed” by default. That means, only members of the groups will be able to see what’s going on within the group. Whenever anyone post something new, all the members of the group will be notified. So, for (from Facebook blog) example, you don’t have to worry about whether your parents saw the pictures of their grandchilds you posted and you can also be assured about who sees what you post.

The new Groups comes with a group chat now. Now, you will be able to chat will everyone in your group at once. So, sharing and communication within your group will be so much easier than before.

Groups can also be used as a replacement for mailing list by setting up your group to send an email to you whenever anyone posts in it. Group email address can also be set to allow members to keep in touch even if they’re not on Facebook, as emails they send will turn into posts in the group.

As said above, Groups will be Closed by defualt on creation. This means only the members of the group will be able to see the contents of the group. The name of the group and its members will still be visible to everyone. By using the group settings, you can make your group as “Secret” if you don’t want your group and its members to be listed to others. If you want it to be more open to others, then you can use the “Open” settings.

With the new Groups, like Facebook wants, you can have you own online space where you will have a whole new experience of sharing and communication with a close group of people.

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Facebook Down for 2.5 Hours

September 24, 2010

Here’s the response from Facebook about yesterday’s two and a half hour site outage.

Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.

The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.

The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.

Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.

To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.

The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful – we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.

This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.

We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.

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How To change Your Email On Facebook

September 22, 2010

This short tutorial will show you

  • How to add email address to your Facebook account.
  • How to change your contact email
  • How to remove email address from your Facebook account.

Please follow the steps.
1. Login to your Facebook Account.

2. Go to your Account Settings.

fb accountsettings How To change Your Email On Facebook

3. In your “My account” page, click the ‘change’ link located to the far end of the “Email” section.

FB add edit email How To change Your Email On Facebook

4. Enter the new email address (make sure that it is a valid email address) in the provided text box and click on the “Add new email” button.

FB add email How To change Your Email On Facebook

5. A confirmation dialog will appear. Enter your Facebook account’s password and click on “confirm” button.

FB add email2 How To change Your Email On Facebook

6. Facebook will sent a confirmation mail to the email address that you just added. Leave the Facebook window open and go to that email address.

7. Wait for a couple of minutes if the confirmation from Facebook is not there. You can click on the resend button on the Facebook page that you have left open in step 6.

8. Confirm the mail by clicking on the confirmation link.

By clicking on the link, you will be taken to your Facebook’s account settings. If you see the new email listed there, congrats! you have just added a new email to your Facebook account.

Changing/Removing email on Facebook

In the email section of your Facebook’s account setting page you will see something like the image given below.

FB add email4 How To change Your Email On Facebook

  • To remove any email click on the ‘(Remove)’ link and enter your account’s password to confirm it.

    You might have notice that all except one email address has the ‘(Remove)’ link. To remove that email, first select another email as the contact email.

    Note: Your contact email is the email where Facebook sends all the notifications regarding your Facebook account.

  • To change your contact email, select the email by clicking on the associated radio button, and click on the “Change Contact Email” button and confirm it by entering your password.

I hope this short tutorial will help some of you. If you face any problems following the tutorial, leave a comment and we will be happy to try our best to help you out.

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How To Unblock A Person On Facebook

September 17, 2010

On Facebook, there comes a time when we need to unblock someone whom we have blocked. This short post will guide you in doing so.

Unblocking a person on Facebook is rather easy. Follow the following steps (refer to the images):

1. After you login to your Facebook account, click on the “Account” tab and select “Privacy Settings”.

account privacysettings How To Unblock A Person On Facebook

2. In the Privacy Settings Page, click on “Edit your list” under the Block lists section.

fb Blocklist How To Unblock A Person On Facebook

3. In the Block lists Page, you will see a the list of all the person that you have blocked. Unblock them by clicking on “Unblock” option next to their name.

fb Blocklist a How To Unblock A Person On Facebook

Once the person is unblocked, you will have to send him/her a friend request to stay connected and communicate.

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How To Revoke Permission Given To Rouge Application On Facebook

August 17, 2010

If you have granted permission to any rogue application to access your profile data, here is a short ‘How To’ on revoking the permission.

To revoke your permission for a particular app, follow the steps:

1. Go to ‘Application Settings’ through your ‘Account’ tab.

fb appsettings How To Revoke Permission Given To Rouge Application On Facebook

2. Browse through the list and remove the click on the ‘x’ present on the far right of the application’s name.

fb appsettings removeapp How To Revoke Permission Given To Rouge Application On Facebook

3. If you don’t see the application in the list, select ‘authorized’ from the drop down menu next to ‘Show’ as shown in the image below. Repeat step 2.

fb appsettings authorised How To Revoke Permission Given To Rouge Application On Facebook

Let us know if this small tutorial was helpful.

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The Business of Facebook

August 9, 2010

Here’s an interesting infographic outlining the business of Facebook. It includes the history of the social network with major business milestones that were achieved along the way.

Facebook Business e1281397708278 The Business of Facebook

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How To Remove Yourself From Public Search On Facebook

July 30, 2010

In view of the recent news about 100 million Facebook profile being leaked, we would like to bring to you a short tutorial on how to exclude yourself from such situation.

The profile data that were leak were actually nothing new. All the information is already available if one searches it. The listed users are those who have not bothered to remove themselves from being listed on public search engines.

Here is a quick How To:

1. Log in to your Facebook Account.

2. Select the Privacy Settings options from the Accounts tab.

fb account privacysettings How To Remove Yourself From Public Search On Facebook

3. At the bottom of the following page, you will find the settings for ‘Applications and Websites’. Click on the ‘Edit your settings’ link.

fb account privacysettings applicationsandwebsites 300x211 How To Remove Yourself From Public Search On Facebook

4. On the following page, you will find a ‘public search’ at the bottom of the list. Click on the ‘Edit Settings’ button located at the far right side.

fb account privacysettings publicsearch 300x212 How To Remove Yourself From Public Search On Facebook

5.  Now you’ll see a description of the public search settings and at the bottom of the description, ‘Enable public search’ with a check box in front of it.

fb account privacysettings publicsearchsettings 300x81 How To Remove Yourself From Public Search On Facebook

Uncheck the option and congratulations, “you have just removed yourself from public search.”

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