Blog Geekery: Facebook Comment Crossposting
One of the biggest problems with blogging to multiple places is that comments also get spread out all over the place. While as far as I know it's impossible to cross-post all comments everywhere, there is a neat WordPress plugin that will import Facebook comments to WordPress. It's called Facebook CommentsTNG. For those interested, here are the details:
- You give the plugin your Facebook login info. Don't worry, I looked over the code — it's not sending your login info to some third party or anything.
- Every hour, or every day, or manually (your choice), it will scrape your Facebook notes for comments, and post them on your WordPress blog.
- This only works for Notes that Facebook has automatically imported via an RSS feed from your blog.
Setting It Up
After installing and activating the module, and giving it my FB login info, I tried to test it, and it didn't work. Since it didn't work out of the box, I do that thing I do: I tinkered with it until it worked. So here are the steps I took to get it to work, by the numbers:
- Install and activate Facebook CommentsTNG plugin.
- Click Test. It will likely show a blank screen. If it actually shows some stuff, skip ahead to step 6.
- Go back to Facebook in your browser and refresh. It will probably have logged you out.
- Log in again. Go through the steps of verifying that everything is okay.
- In WordPress, click Test again. This time it should show you your friends' notes.
- Go to http://m.facebook.com/notes.php, scroll down, and click My Notes.
- In the URL there will be a variable like http://m.facebook.com/notes.php?id=123456789&fbb=r5b9aec88&refid=21 — copy that number after "id=".
- Paste that number into the Page ID setting for the plugin.
- Click Test again. This time it should show you your posts.
If that all worked well, you're set. Click to have it check hourly, or daily. Or if you want to control exactly when comments get scraped, select Manual.
Caveats
This is not a perfect solution. Comments on WordPress don't get posted back to Facebook. But the bigger problem is that this only works if you have Facebook auto-importing your blog posts from the RSS feed.
Why is this a problem? Because Facebook breaks the formatting to all hell when it does this. I would much prefer a plugin that scraped comments from RSS Graffiti feeds to my profile. I looked into hacking it to do this, but unfortunately RSS Graffiti links (and I assume links auto-posted to your profile by any other application) don't show up when you view your own stream in the mobile site. And with all the AJAX on the non-mobile version of Facebook, it would be a nightmare to try and parse the main page.
There is a plugin that cross-posts RSS Graffiti comments (Facebook Comments Importer)… but only if RSS Graffiti is importing your posts onto a fan page, not onto your profile.
Summation
If I want to have my comments cross-posted, then I have to either continue using the shitty Notes auto-import on Facebook, or make a fan page for my blog and have RSS Graffiti import there (which means my friends won't see new posts unless they're fans of that page). I don't like either solution, but for the time being I think I'll stick with the Notes auto-importer. My blog posts will look shitty on Facebook, especially whenever they include pictures (which they almost always do), but it's the best solution I've got for the time being.
Except, now that I've stopped importing blog posts to Facebook, it refuses to recognize my blog's RSS feed. Damnit, Facebook.
On a related note, I just found out there is a similar plugin for LiveJournal — so if you automatically cross-post entries to LJ (as I do), comments on LJ will also be scraped and posted on your main WordPress blog site. Just installed that and, of course, it doesn't seem to be working right. So I'm going to tinker with that now.