Finding the RSS feed for your Facebook status updates

June 11, 2010 by JD · 4 Comments
Filed under: RSS Feeds, Social Networking 

I use RSS feeds quite a bit to keep track of what I have said and to learn what my friends are saying on their blogs and social networking sites.

One thing has been bothering me and I just haven’t had enough energy to track it down and implement it until this morning.

In the left and right columns of this blog, you’ll find several RSS feeds showing recent updates on several of my blogs and several of the social networking communities I manage. It makes it easy for me to visit this blog and see at a glance what is being said on my other sites.

So, what’s been bothering you, JD?

I’ve been wanting to add the status updates I’ve posted to Facebook, but I didn’t see an easy way to find the feed. I’ve looked at the source code for my Facebook profile page and saw no evidence of an RSS feed, so I would just let the matter drop and/or forget about it.

This morning, I decided to give it another go. To make it easy on myself, I decided to see if anyone else had solved the problem. No use reinventing the wheel, right?

I did a simple search on Google for “Facebook RSS Feed” and found the answer to my question on the very first page returned in the search results. (Gotta love that!)

On TechLifeWeb.com there is an article: How to find your Facebook Status RSS feed.

Apparently, Facebook has changed how this works, but the updated information in the article helped me find the RSS feed I was looking for.

So, I came here and added a new RSS widget to the right column and pasted in the URL of the feed.

It didn’t work.

I knew the feed was working, because I could view that URL in Safari and see all the recent status updates I’ve posted.

Then I looked closer at the URL. When I changed feed:// to http://, the RSS feed widget correctly displayed my status updates. You can see them in the right column of this blog.

It’s not a huge thing, but it’s difficult to find.

Facebook makes this more difficult than it should be, but it’s still possible to make use of it with a little digging.

All the best,

JD

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Post flyers to your Facebook profile from Vflyer

March 12, 2009 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Advertising, Dilbeck Marketing, Internet Marketing, Murphy NC 28906, Web Services 

Do you know about Vflyer.com?

I’ve been watching this site as it has developed over the last couple of years and opened a free account in 2007, but never did much with it. I created a test flyer, but never published it.

I think Vflyer.com is ideally suited for people who sell products and who want to create flyers with text and photos using templates that are pretty well designed.

For example, if I were a real estate salesman or sold cars, I’d be using this service on a regular basis.

Since I sell services, I haven’t found it to be all that useful for me, but I keep in touch with what they’re doing so I can pass it along to my consulting clients.

Today, however, when I was catching up on reading the blogs to which I subscribe, I ran across a very interesting post on the Vflyer blog:

New Feature! Post Links to Your Flyers to Your Facebook Profile.

That caught my attention!

I’m always looking for ways to leverage my advertising on social networking sites.

Since I hadn’t visited my Vflyer site in awhile, I went there and saw how pathetic it really was. Now that I was aware of it, I couldn’t leave it like that, so I spent a half-hour or so updating the information and creating a new flyer for my local marketing consulting.

Just as their blog indicated, it was extremely easy to post a link to my new flyer on my Facebook profile.

Not only that, Vflyer automatically posted the flyer to my Google Base account and could have posted to other sites, but, since this was mainly for testing, I chose not to do that.

Another nice thing about Vflyer is that it is easy to create a PDF of your flyer that you can print, email, or otherwise distribute, even if you know practically nothing about PDFs.

There are a few things I don’t like about the flyer I created.

At the top of the flyer, where I’m describing my service, it does not put a blank line between paragraphs, or even indent new paragraphs, and I think that is just bad form.

Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the layout and the ease of creation of the flyer.

I could have done it myself using Pages or a word processor, but it would have taken much longer and probably would not have looked as nice.

The other thing I am not happy with is the wording in the attributes section of the flyer. I know that it should talk to my clients and should not be about me, so there are some things I will be changing before I start distributing it seriously.

Still, it’s not bad for a free service and about a half-hour of work.

If you’re my friend on Facebook, you can see the link to the flyer.

I know I don’t use enough photos on my blogs and other publications, and this flyer is no different. If I had more talent in that area, I’m sure I could have found a good photo, but I didn’t.

However, if you’re renting property, selling homes, selling cars, or running a service business that is more appropriate for photos, Vflyer makes it easy to add them.

As a free user, you obviously don’t have all the features that paid members enjoy, but it still does a very good job. Paid accounts start at less than $15 per month and I believe their service would easily be worth that amount if I sold high-end products, especially if I lived in a larger town that had a local Craigslist or Kijiji site.

All in all, this was an unexpected, yet very interesting diversion from what I had planned for my morning.

I already know of a couple of clients I’ll be advising to start using the services provided by Vflyer.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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