Facebook News Feeds

Now that I'm back from 1863 it's time to get back into web design.  Almost a year ago I wrestled with Facebook, trying to get it to publish updates from my blog.  I won.  Now the dance has begun again.

Then, I was blogging with Wordpress and wanted new posts to automatically show up on Facebook.  This was before Facebook reorganized and it was easier to publish things directly on your main page.  But my real goal was for my blog posts to show up on my friends' pages; when you log on and check your "news feed" with all the updates from all your friends, I wanted my blog posts to be there too.  After experimenting with various plugins for Wordpress and Drupal and even trying to create my own custom Facebook app, I discovered Facebook actually has a secret, built-in function to do exactly this.  Now, Facebook automatically pulls new posts from my blog and publishes them just like any other FB news event, without any fancy Drupal plugins or complicated futzing.

Now, a year later, I want to do the same thing, but this time it's from a Joomla news feed to a Facebook page.  Theoretically this shouldn't be too hard because an RSS feed is an RSS feed whether it's coming from Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla.  (Of course, that's not entirely true because it could be RSS 2.0 or an Atom feed, but that shouldn't matter.)  And on the other end, it shouldn't be too hard because I'm an admin for the FB page and FB pages supposedly work just like real people now.

Of course, it wasn't simple or easy at all.  We don't have an RSS feed icon on Bleue Blood, but luckily Firefox automatically detects the feed for you.  And on the other end, Facebook's interface is slightly different for pages, so the secret feature was just that much harder to find.

The solution came from a comment buried deep on a "how-to" page from another site:

1. David Patrick Says: 
   June 10th, 2009 at 9:52 am

   First create your business page.

   Second add ‘Notes’ as an additional tab alongside WALL, INFO, PHOTOS, BOXES

   Third click on ‘Write a new note’ and add a test note then save draft(this can be deleted later)

   Fourth, in the notes settings click ‘edit import setting’

   Fifth, add your blogs RSS feed and tick the permission box

   That’s it.

   David

Guess what: it works.  Thanks, David!

Now Bleue Blood articles are automatically posted to Facebook.

J<