It's been awhile since I posted. Since then, there have been many changes in my life including my graduation from university and the embarkation on the working world. I have also learnt many more things as well as met many more people. I also reluctantly started using Facebook a year ago but now check it everyday and share links from friends, which brings me back... well, here... I figured that if I was sharing so many links everyday, and was rather unhappy with the fact that Facebook currently does not allow me to search the links or organize them better. Occasionally when I wanted to refer to a link I posted a month back, I had to click the "Load New Posts" several times under the links section before I could find the link. What made it worse was that now is the mobile age and the Facebook Mobile iPhone App lacks text searching functionality so it makes it hard to find a link. Therefore, I felt that collating them on this blog would be better in the long run, so that is what I've set out to do.
First, I searched online to see if Facebook could post to this blog automatically. However very little information turned up and I was quite disappointed because that would mean that I either might have to copy links manually from Facebook or have to do the reverse which is post on the blog and have it sent to Facebook, preferrably automatically.
Being a programmer means that I'm lazy and will never settle for a manual solution so I started to see if I could find out how to get Blogger/Blogspot to post to Facebook automatically. I found that the common solution was to get Facebook to read the RSS of this blog and it will automatically convert posts into Notes. Here is a great tutorial on how to do so: http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/how-to-add-your-blog-feed-to-your-facebook-profile.html However, I still was not satisfied with this solution because the main way I used Facebook was just for sharing links. As you can probably tell at the start of this post, I gave up the whole blogging thing, so I did not want to keep posting into my Facebook notes. I wanted it to post into Facebook links instead of notes!
Having some spare time to kill, I tried looking for other ways to get around this. Unfortunately, I kept finding the Facebook notes solution and I decided to go back to trying to see if there was a way to get Facebook to post to Blogger/Blogspot instead, which is the ideal solution anyway. Then I logged into Facebook and started to see if there was anything in the links section at all that would give me a hint. Then I found it! Apparently, Facebook has RSS for the links section of a user. Then Google did the rest of the magic and I found out that if I could get this RSS to email me whenever I posted something, I could forward the email to the Blogspot posting email and that should do the trick. Then I checked the Help section of Gmail to see if there was some setting that I could use, but it turned out that Gmail does not support having an RSS email you even though you may have a Google Reader account, so I found out about http://www.feedmyinbox.com/ which is exactly what I needed.
So in summary, in order to get Facebook to post to Blogspot, here's the steps you should do:
- Go to your Facebook profile
- Go to your links section ( This is not the same as your newsfeed section where you can see your friends' posts)
- Look for the "Subscribe to Links" area and copy the link of the "My Links" button. This is your RSS feed for your links posts from Facebook.
- Get Feedmyinbox to forward this RSS feed to your email account ( if you want a more direct route, you can also directly post to your blog, but beware that any admin messages from Feedmyinbox will appear publicly on your blog, so this is not advised!)
- Set up your Blogger/Blogspot posting email address. This should be under "Settings", then "Email & Mobile" tab.
- For Gmail users, you can set a filter to forward all messages from Feedmyinbox to your blog posting email address and this will effectively post the messages for you. For other emails, you have to figure out your own way to get the messages automatically forwarded.
