PHP: Show your facebook status on your blog/website. (Works with new facebook)

Hello

After searching around on the internet for some time, I discovered that all of the previous scripts that had been made to do this job had been written for the old facebook which has long since been depriciated. I then started to consider how I would go about doing this with the NEW facebook since they removed the mini-feed which was vital to the old method.

After some fishing around in google, I resorted to copying links from images in old-method tutorials and stumbled upon this little gem: [url]http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php[/url]. After trying out the link, and subsequently kicking myself I thought I was onto something. I was jumping for joy as I clicked "[b]Status Stories[/b]" and visited the "[b]Subscribe to these stories[/b]" link, which returned an RSS feed.

I then fired up my php editor, and typed something similar to the following
[php]<?php
$xml=simplexml_load_file(http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=820080788&viewer=820080788&key=********&format=rss20);
print_r($xml);
?>[/php]

This returned any amount of horrible errors, and maybe you should try it for yourself to see what I mean. After a few days of poking around, I eventually tried to fetch the same page using my Lynx text-based web browser. What I found was that instead of return XML as it did for me (using IE, Firefox or Safari), a php page was shown with the message:
"You are using an incompatible web browser.

Sorry, we’re not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it
real with one of the following browsers:
* Mozilla Firefox
* Opera
* Safari
* Microsoft Internet Explorer
* Flock"

Now I was onto something . If Facebook requires the browser to be Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE or Flock (WTF is flock) then I must have to spoof my way in by pretending to use one of these browsers. Now I had to figure out how I was going to do this. After much trawling of [url=http://www.php.net]php.net[/url] and [url=http://www.google.com]google[/url] I found that there was no way to do it using the method I was previously using. After a few minutes of trying different things, I decided that I was going to fetch the xml file using curl and use the function [i]simplexml_load_file[/i] to load the string instead.

So off I went. Being unfamiliar with Curl, I set about trawling [url=http://www.php.net]php.net[/url] and came up with the following:

All the instructions + explanations are in the php comments (Lines beginning with //)
[php]<?php

// initialize a new curl resource
$ch = curl_init();

// set the url to fetch
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=[FACEBOOK USER ID]&viewer=[FACEBOOK USER ID]&key=[ACCESS KEY (Get this by visiting this page in your browser from http://www.facebook.com/http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php#/minifeed.php?filter=11)]&format=rss20′);

// don’t give me the headers just the content
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

// return the value instead of printing the response to browser
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

// use a user agent to mimic a browser
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0′);

// execute the curl command
$xml = curl_exec($ch);

//close the connection
curl_close($ch);

//load the result into a simplexml resource
$sxml = simplexml_load_string($xml);

//Get the title (I figured this out by using print_r($sxml)
$title = $sxml->channel->item->title;

//Same for the time
$tmk = $sxml->channel->item->pubDate;

//strtotime returns a integer timestamp which is more useful than our string (yesterday at xxx or whatever it was)
//I also cast to string using (string)$tmk as php was complaining about $tmk being a resource
$timestamp = strtotime((string)$tmk);

//Set the time back to my desired human-readable format
$time = date(‘d/m/y’, $timestamp);

//Italicise my name. You will have to change 11 to the correct length for your name. I get 11 from ‘<em>Stephen’
//To not italicise your name completely remove this line! \/
$title = substr_replace(‘<em>’.$title, ‘</em>’, 11, 0);

//Output the result
echo ‘<p>’.$time.’ – ‘.$title.’</p>’;

?>[/php]

And there we have it. If you would like to know more about this script, or I have forgotten something please leave me a comment. I hope this is of some use to you

Thanks
Stephen

Posted in Tutorials |