Thank you!

Another Facebook redesign has changed the way to get to your installed applications. We no longer have the context popup menu at the bottom left of our profile pages. Here’s an alternate way to get to the Custom Profile Box editor:

1) Go to your Personal Profile
2) Immediately below the box for entering your status updates, at the lower right, is a button entitled ‘Options” (there is a little magnifying glass there, too) Click it. It should turn into a button titled ‘Settings’.
3) Click this new Settings button. Everything below that should be replaced with new material.
4) At the bottom of this new material is an area, delineated by a horizontal line, entitled “Application Settings”. In this section is a hyperlink with the text “application settings page”. Click that link. This should take you to a listing of all the applications you have installed.
5) Find Custom Profile Box in the listed applications.Note that this list is filtered by the dropdown at the upper right entitled ‘Show’. If you cannot find Custom Profile Box, choose another filter from the dropdown until it appears.
6) Once you locate the row with ‘Custom Profile Box’, click on the name ‘Custom Profile Box’. This should zip you straight to the editor.

There may be an easier way of getting there. Like any complex application, FB seems to provide several ways of accomplishing the same task. This is just the method that hit me this evening as I was playing with your problem.

Let me know if this does or doesn’t work!

I was having that problem at first. For me, the solution was to insert some text in the profile box, and saving it. Lately, there have been several reports that this is not working for people. Perhaps this is the result of one of FB’s interminable redesigns? I don;t know, but I can think of a few things to try.

First, make sure that you are entering text in the Editor page. The ‘Editor’ page seems to be unchanged from when I first wrote this guide. The title bar should read “Custom Profile Box on Facebook”. On the page proper is a field with Facebook info, then a graphic ‘Custom Profile Box Write anything on your profile’, a button entitled ‘+ Invite friends to add Custom Profile Box’, then a toolbar with editing control buttons, and below that a large text field where you enter your code.

Next, make sure you save your edits using the big blue “Update Custom Profile Box” button. If you leave this Editor page, and come back to it later, only to find your edits gone, it is not being saved for some reason.

The editor has two modes — WYSIWYG and Code. Try each of them. The Code view takes FBML, which is very similar to HTML. It has some quirks however that can drive experienced HTML coders batty.

Start with something simple, and see if that is displayed. Maybe just some raw text in Code mode. Build it a little at a time to learn where things go wrong.

Those are just some things to try for now. I’ll create a new page, and see if the other instructions still work for me. We’ll crack it somehow.

I’m wanting to convert my client’s 5000 friends to fans, so I’m following your work around instructions for adding content to the custom profile box, but i get stumped here:

“1. Click on the ‘Applications’ status bar menu …select the app from the pop up window. ” Can you tell me how to get to there? I tried clicking on the Apps from my left side bar but no pop-up window. I’m so close! Can you help me please, Joe? Thanks! Rebecca