Getting an RSS feed from Facebook

From my experience Facebook tends to provoke strong reactions, both positive or negative. As a developer who works with Facebook often in one way or another I’ve had lots of frustrating moments mainly due to poor/incorrect documentation.

I spent a while trying to find the best way to export a public Facebook pages posts in the form of an RSS feed. Facebook don’t provide an easy way to do this (only on Notifications, e.g. facebook.com/notifications.php), although it can be done with a workaround in 2 different ways.

Via Twitter

You can connect a Facebook page to Twitter and any new posts will automatically be sent to a Twitter account you specify (you can do this through facebook.com/twitter/). With this carried out, you can then access the RSS feed of the Twitter account. This works but confines you to the 140 characters limit and will include a link back to the original Facebook post within the tweet.

The long way round

Another way would be to make a system to automatically create an RSS feed from the Facebook pages JSON feed (example: https://graph.facebook.com/pagename or id/feed). This has the benefit of displaying your Facebook posts in full. The downside is of course the extra work and complication involved.

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