By yelvington on

Facebook has a Twitter-like feature in which you can update your "status" -- a one-liner formatted as [whatever you type].

It's now possible to export your Facebook status as an RSS feed, which means you can add it to your Drupal site.

The hard part is finding your personal status "feed." Go to your Facebook Profile page and look for the "Mini-Feed" box. Click on the "See all" link. On the right rail of the resulting page is a list of links; one of them is "Status stories." That's the one you want. Click it.

Now you have a page labeled "My Mini-Feed" that is limited to your own status updates. Look in the right rail for an RSS icon and a label, "Subscribe to these stories." There's your RSS link.

Grab the URL and add it to the Aggregator on your website. Set the refresh time to the lowest possible value (15 minutes) and make sure cron runs at least that frequently.

Currently, the Aggregator module produces a block for each feed. You can place that block in any region. Voila: Your Facebook status is now reflected on your Drupal site.

By editing the block configuration you can change or remove the title and limit the number of links it presents. Unfortunately, Aggregator blocks currently can be limited to 2 links, but not 1, so you can't present only your current Facebook status on your website, and you also can't turn off the "more" link at the bottom of the block. These limitations will probably lead me to write my own module at some point.

One nice thing about Facebook is that the status can be updated remotely, from a mobile phone through Facebook's XHTML-MP site (m.facebook.com) or via SMS from selected carriers.

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

"formatted as [whatever you type]." should read "formatted as 'username is' [whatever you type]."

liamgoldstein’s picture

liamgoldstein commented

Hi,

This is a little more advanced but if you have access to you databases there's a table called aggregator_feed and if you set block to 1 here it'll only display 1 entry.

Can I also clarify that if you want rss to update every 15mins you have to set cron.php to run every 15mins?

Liam

cmayberry’s picture

cmayberry commented

They moved FB profiles all around and I cant find the screen I need to be on to get the rss. Please advise. Thank you.

mrthumpz’s picture

mrthumpz commented

It is impossible to find in the interface with the new facebook, but this link still works.

http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php#/minifeed.php?filter=11

vm’s picture

vm commented

you can use the facebook "create a badge" feature on facebook as well and paste the code given to a block. The status update gets pulled from facebook and shows on your drupal site. see: personal.verymisunderstood.com for a glimpse.

andywalters’s picture

andywalters commented

You can also use the fbstatus module rather than bothering with the aggregator. I did it at andy-walters.com successfully. Pretty easy actually.