How to update Facebook from RSS
Aug. 16th, 2012 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerIt is clearly a nightmare working with the Facebook API, because so many things work with it in a mediocre fashion.
I post my links (and images from Tumblr) on a Facebook Page, so that they're available to people who use FB (on top of people who use Twitter, LJ, DW or RSS). However, sharing them didn't say that they came from 'me', meaning people were having to put in "via ..." - I even had one person ask me if I could fix that.
So I did - but it took me numerous hours, because depending on exactly which reposter I used, and what settings, all sorts of different stuff happens.
For a start, there's two different reshares that can happen when you click the "share" button. The one on this post takes you to a reshare URL using the template "http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u='URL of shared page", which the one on this post takes you to a reshare URL using the template "https://www.facebook.com/ajax/sharer/?s=ID of update to share". The former just creates a new post referencing the URL, the latter creates a new post referencing the original update, along with attribution.
I started off using IFTTT, which is incredibly handy for moving data from one place to another, but didn't do what I wanted. I then tried a variety of other solutions, before ending up using RSS Grafitti, and setting it the Post Style to "Status Update".
I then moved onto the problem of doing likewise with image posts. I wanted to have full-size images that are reshared properly, fed from my Tumblr. This one _was_ actually dead easy, once I clicked that you can do that when sharing images that are already on FB, but not links to pages that contain images. So now I'm using IFTTT to upload Tumblr Pics to Facebook and post them on my links page's wall.
All of which was an enormous faff, but having set out to make it work, I wasn't going to give up easily. I wasn't _that_ far from starting to write my own...
I post my links (and images from Tumblr) on a Facebook Page, so that they're available to people who use FB (on top of people who use Twitter, LJ, DW or RSS). However, sharing them didn't say that they came from 'me', meaning people were having to put in "via ..." - I even had one person ask me if I could fix that.
So I did - but it took me numerous hours, because depending on exactly which reposter I used, and what settings, all sorts of different stuff happens.
For a start, there's two different reshares that can happen when you click the "share" button. The one on this post takes you to a reshare URL using the template "http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u='URL of shared page", which the one on this post takes you to a reshare URL using the template "https://www.facebook.com/ajax/sharer/?s=ID of update to share". The former just creates a new post referencing the URL, the latter creates a new post referencing the original update, along with attribution.
I started off using IFTTT, which is incredibly handy for moving data from one place to another, but didn't do what I wanted. I then tried a variety of other solutions, before ending up using RSS Grafitti, and setting it the Post Style to "Status Update".
I then moved onto the problem of doing likewise with image posts. I wanted to have full-size images that are reshared properly, fed from my Tumblr. This one _was_ actually dead easy, once I clicked that you can do that when sharing images that are already on FB, but not links to pages that contain images. So now I'm using IFTTT to upload Tumblr Pics to Facebook and post them on my links page's wall.
All of which was an enormous faff, but having set out to make it work, I wasn't going to give up easily. I wasn't _that_ far from starting to write my own...
