Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

tillyoshea · Sun 28 Nov, 2010 18.05

I'm trying to convert the status updates on this page - http://www.facebook.com/arrivanortheast - into an RSS feed, and struggling.

Why a company would choose to post bus services updates on Facebook in the first place is somewhat beyond me... But is anyone able to suggest a way to extract them to a more useful RSS format?

Thanks for your help!

Steve in Pudsey · Sun 28 Nov, 2010 19.20

The HTML suggests there should be an RSS feed (link rel="alternate" type="text/xml+rss") but it leads to a 404.

You might find that the mobile version http://m.facebook.com/arrivanortheast is more amenable to screen scraping.

Jamesypoo · Mon 29 Nov, 2010 02.16

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php? ... 4877246172 works for me.

tillyoshea · Mon 29 Nov, 2010 07.02

Jamesypoo wrote:http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php? ... 4877246172 works for me.

It doesn't for me

I think it has some kind of user-agent detection on it, which won't let me pull it into a feed-reader.

Beep · Mon 29 Nov, 2010 08.10

tillyoshea wrote:
Jamesypoo wrote:http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php? ... 4877246172 works for me.
It doesn't for me

I think it has some kind of user-agent detection on it, which won't let me pull it into a feed-reader.

If you're trying to use that as an RSS, it's actually an ATOM feed.

tillyoshea · Mon 29 Nov, 2010 14.52

Beep wrote:
tillyoshea wrote:
Jamesypoo wrote:http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php? ... 4877246172 works for me.
It doesn't for me

I think it has some kind of user-agent detection on it, which won't let me pull it into a feed-reader.
If you're trying to use that as an RSS, it's actually an ATOM feed.

You can make it RSS by just changing 'atom10' to 'rss20' - although either will serve my purpose.

I can access that feed through Chrome, but trying to access it through a feed reader, or any web-based feed parser (eg FeedBurner or Yahoo Pipes) produces a 403 'Forbidden' error. I can't work out how to navigate around that problem...

Ant · Mon 29 Nov, 2010 15.23

I remember reading somewhere that long-time Facebook users have access to their own RSS feed (so basically users that accessed their feed before the feature got removed a few years ago).

Maybe it's the same for seeing other people's feeds.