How to add a Facebook "Like" button to an AJAX driven page

I have trawled the net and Stack Overflow and have not found an adequate answer to this question. Before I start the trial and error process of finding my own solution, I thought I would turn to the Stack Overflow braintrust and see if there was already a successful implementation.

I have an AJAX powered page that degrades properly for non-javascript browsers and SEO. Each click in the AJAX version can be represented by a unique URL.

What I want to do is to dynamically change the HREF of the button. I do understand that this tag is converted to standard HTML at runtime (namely into a nasty table / iframe layout).

I was just wondering if anyone had any insight as to how to implement this FB like button onto AJAX powered pages?

Cheers in advance :)

EDIT:

What do you think of this method I just hacked together? See any huge problems with it?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>

    <script src="JS/jquery/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>

    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        $("document").ready
        (
            function ()
            {
                CreateNewLikeButton("http://www.yahoo.com")

                $("a#ChangeToGoogle").click
                (
                    function (e)
                    {
                        e.preventDefault();
                        CreateNewLikeButton("http://www.google.ca")
                    }
                );

            }
        );

        function CreateNewLikeButton(url)
        {
            var elem = $(document.createElement("fb:like"));
            elem.attr("href", url);
            $("div#Container").empty().append(elem);
            FB.XFBML.parse($("div#Container").get(0));
        }
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <a id="ChangeToGoogle" href="#">Change To Google</a>
    <div id="Container">
        <fb:like href="http://www.NEVER_LINK_TO_THIS_12345.com"></fb:like>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>

</html>

SIMPLE SOLUTION

Just parse trigger the parse function when load complete.

If you’re using jQuery, there’s a real easy and slick solution to this problem:

$(document).ajaxComplete(function(){
    try{
        FB.XFBML.parse(); 
    }catch(ex){}
});

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

This is the solution I ended up going with:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>

    <script src="JS/jquery/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>

    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        $("document").ready
        (
            function ()
            {
                CreateNewLikeButton("http://www.yahoo.com")

                $("#ChangeToGoogle").click
                (
                    function (e)
                    {
                        e.preventDefault();
                        CreateNewLikeButton("http://www.google.ca")
                    }
                );

            }
        );

        function CreateNewLikeButton(url)
        {
            var elem = $(document.createElement("fb:like"));
            elem.attr("href", url);
            $("#Container").empty().append(elem);
            FB.XFBML.parse($("#Container").get(0));
        }
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <a id="ChangeToGoogle" href="#">Change To Google</a>
    <div id="Container">
        <fb:like href="http://www.NEVER_LINK_TO_THIS_12345.com"></fb:like>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>

</html>

You're making this hard on yourself - just render a new iframe-based one.

<html>
<head>
  <title>Test Page</title>

  <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">  

  $(function()
  {
    $( '#ChangeToGoogle' ).click( function( event )
    {
      event.preventDefault();

      $( '#Container' ).empty().append( $('<iframe />')
        .attr( 'src', 'http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=www.google.com&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80' )
        .attr( 'scrolling', 'no' )
        .attr( 'frameborder', 'no' )
        .attr( 'style', 'border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:80px;' )
        .attr( 'allowTransparency', 'true' )        
      );            
    });
  });

  </script>
</head>

<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <a id="ChangeToGoogle" href="#">Change To Google</a>
    <div id="Container">
      <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=www.yahoo.com&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80"
        scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
        style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:80px;"
        allowTransparency="true">
      </iframe>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>

How to add a Facebook "Like" button to an AJAX driven page

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