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Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

Posted: Sun 28 Nov, 2010 18.05
by tillyoshea
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!

Re: Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

Posted: Sun 28 Nov, 2010 19.20
by Steve in Pudsey
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.

Re: Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

Posted: Mon 29 Nov, 2010 02.16
by Jamesypoo

Re: Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

Posted: Mon 29 Nov, 2010 07.02
by tillyoshea
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.

Re: Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

Posted: Mon 29 Nov, 2010 08.10
by Beep
tillyoshea wrote:
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.

Re: Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

Posted: Mon 29 Nov, 2010 14.52
by tillyoshea
Beep wrote:
tillyoshea wrote:
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...

Re: Convert Facebook Status Updates to RSS

Posted: Mon 29 Nov, 2010 15.23
by Ant
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.