title: PHP & Facebook: facebook-debug a URL using CURL and Facebook debugger
body: <p><strong>Facts</strong>: I run a simple website that contains articles, articles dynamically acquired by scraping third-party websites/blogs etc (new articles arrive to my website every half an hour or so), articles which I wish to post on my facebook page. Each article typically includes an image, a title and some text.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Problem</strong>: Most (almost all) of the articles that I post on Facebook are not posted correctly - their images are missing.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Inefficient Solution</strong>: Using Facebook's debugger <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/" rel="nofollow">(this one)</a> I submit an article's URL to it (URL from my website, not the original source's URL) and Facebook then scans/scrapes the URL and correctly extracts the needed information (image, title, text etc). After this action, the article can be posted on Facebook correctly - no missing images or anything.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Goal</strong>: What I am after is a way to create a process which will submit a URL to Facebook's debugger, thus forcing Facebook to scan/scrape the URL so that it can then be posted correctly. I believe that what I need to do is to create an HTML POST request containing the URL and submit it to Facebook's debugger. Is this the correct way to go? And if yes, as I have no previous experience with CURL, what is the correct way to do it using CURL in PHP?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Side Notes</strong>: As a side note, I should mention that I am using short URLs for my articles, although I do not think that this is the cause of the problem because the problem persists even when I use the canonical URLs. </p>
  
  <p>Also, the Open Graph meta tags are correctly set (og:image, og:description, etc).</p>