I’ve been suffering from some information overload. I subscribed to Engadget and Gizmodo because I wanted to keep up with some home based network devices like homeplug/powerline and wireless routers. But Engadget and Gizmodo are overwhelming.
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By using a simple RSS feed, you can have Adium report your Facebook status.
I am a late-adopter to social networks. I participated in LiveJournal years after many of my friends started using it. I finally got into Facebook months after it was “openned up.” I like this strategy because I can immediately find my friends on the network and add them and amass 100s in a few short days.
Facebook is nice for its simple and clean interface. Even the features are fairly simple. I like the status feature… for no good reason. It’s a simple AJAX status update that updates your status on the site. What I don’t like to do is repeat myself. I wanted Adium to repeat what Facebook said.
My first inkling was to use the Facebook API, but that seemed less appealing since it would involve authentication. I almost gave up and then discovered that in Facebook you can go to “My Profile” and under “Status” go to “See All” and there’s an RSS link to your status messages. Awesome. All I needed to do is grab the first one.
I decided this looked like a task for Simple XML which can take an XML string and turn it into a PHP object.
The first step of course was to fetch the RSS feed into a string. file_get_contents made the most sense, but Facebook does a browser check even for getting RSS feeds. I’m not fond of browser sniffing, but its easy to work around if you use cURL.
Excellent… this does exactly what I want - but it’s slow. Like any good script, we should use caching if it makes sense. Obviously we don’t want to overload the servers at Facebook (or for that matter any place that serves up RSS feeds) so we implement PEAR’s Cache_Lite package. We’ll tell it to cache results for 15 minutes. The code changes are marked with //+++ at the end of each new line:
That’s it on the PHP side. On the Adium side you’ll need to use the exec AdiumXtra. It’ll allow you to set your status to something like:
/exec {/usr/local/php5/bin/php /usr/local/bin/facebook.php}
Enjoy.
Read full post[rbu]: http://reviewsby.us/ [ymap]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/index.html [gmap]: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ [ygeo]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html [GeoRSS]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/georss/index.html [symfony]: http://www.symfony-project.com/ [GeoRSS][GeoRSS] is an extension of RSS that incorporates geographic data (i.e. latitude/longitude coordinates). This is useful for plotting any data that might need to be placed on a map. While building out the [reviewsby.us][rbu] map, I decided to use the [Yahoo! Maps API][ymap] versus the [Google Maps API][gmap] because I wanted to gain some familiarity with another API. It was worth trying [Yahoo!'s API][ymap]. First of all, [reviewsby.us][rbu] has addresses for restaurants and Yahoo! provides a simple [Geocoding REST][ygeo] service. This made it easy for me to convert street addresses to latitude and longitude pairs (even though this wasn't required as we'll soon see).[1] The real selling point of [Yahoo!][ymap] was the [GeoRSS] functionality. I can extend an RSS feed (which [symfony] generates quite easily) to add latitude or longitude points (or even the street address), direct my [Yahoo! map][ymap] to the feed and voila, all the locations in that feed are now on the map, and when I click on them, the RSS item is displayed. That cut down on a lot of development time.
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