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

Tags: ,

Regained access to my Feedburner feeds

April 22, 2009 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Blogging, RSS Feeds 

About two months ago, I was wondering about the following question:

Is Aweber or Feedburner better for syndicating blog posts via email?

I still don’t have a definitive answer to that question, so I may just offer both methods, as well as the obvious RSS feed for anyone who wants to subscribe via a feed reader.

It was on March 1st that I discovered that Google had transitioned all the feeds from Feedburner.com to feedburner.google.com. I learned this by discovering that I had no access to any of my Feedburner feeds or the associated features.

After corresponding several times over the last seven weeks with several support reps, I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I checked in at feedburner.google.com to see if anything had changed.

Instead of the annoying message that I had no feeds, I found a link to login at my old account. When I followed that link, I was able to click another link to migrate my feeds to the new system.

Basically, it turned out that I had one or more feeds with URLs that conflicted and therefore they didn’t transfer any of my feeds.

Last week, I told one of the support reps to go ahead and delete the feeds that conflicted, and that must have been the key to solving the puzzle.

I’m happy to have access to these feeds, once again, and I’ve already deleted three that are no longer in use. In the next day or so, I’ll be looking at all the others and deleting all that are no longer relevant to what I’m doing.

I never suspected that it would take as long as it has to stop using old blogs and to clean up after myself from all the experiments I’ve been doing with blogging and various ways of building websites.

Now, all I have to do is try to remember what I was going to do on March 1st.

I wonder if there will be additional problems because of the migration.

If you subscribe to any of my blogs’ or other sites’ RSS feeds via Feedburner and you encounter any problems, I hope you’ll be kind enough to comment on this post and let me know.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: ,