Anne Dorko » Web Apps

Facebook Status RSS feed: How to find it, and what to do with it

Anne — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:24:37 +0000

Today, I discovered Wordle. It’s this neat app that allows you to create beautiful word clouds using custom text input, an RSS feed, or your Delicious account. Well, I wanted to input my Facebook status feed, but alas – I could not find it!

After a little research, I finally found a useful post about finding your Facebook Status RSS feed at Tech Life Web, and I wanted to share my findings with you guys.

*** UPDATE 6/22/2010: Thanks to Shirish, I have learned that this only works if you’re a long time Facebook user. If these instructions aren’t working for you, it may be because you were late to the party!

*** UPDATE 6/24/2011: It would appear there’s some Facebook apps available to provide this functionality if you search for them. Anyone want to try them out and report back how they work for you?

Get the notifications RSS feed

Go to your notifications page: facebook.com/notifications.php

At the bottom of the right hand column you will find a little blue RSS icon with the words “Your Notifications” next to it.

Clicking on that link should take you to your Notifications RSS feed.

Getting your status RSS feed

Now for the tinkering. Your link will look something like this (the X’s represent numbers, which will NOT change):

[html]http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&viewer=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20[/html]

You will take your link, and change the word “notifications” to “status”.

[html]http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&viewer=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20[/html]

That is your status RSS feed.

If you’re one of the people who can’t access that link, try changing the “www” before facebook.com to “apps”, and see if that works for you.

Making the status feed pretty

Right now it probably reads awkward because it will say your name in front of all your updates. If you want to get rid of that, head on over to the Yahoo Pipe Facebook Status RSS Feed Filter.

Copy and paste your status RSS into the text input box and hit “Run pipe”.

Once it is finished, you should see your pretty statuses in the bottom section. To access this as an RSS feed, click the “Get as RSS” link.

You’re done!

If you found this post useful, please follow me on Twitter or Facebook!

If you want to have some fun, head over to Wordle to create your very own word cloud with your statuses. My statuses aren’t too interesting, but here’s what I got:

Setting up WordPress as a dictionary site

Anne — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:58:44 +0000

Updated on 12/05/2011

I just launched the WordPress Dictionary Plugin you asked for!

Check it out here:

Original Post:

Recently, I helped launch a website that served as a silly custom dictionary.

The concept was simple enough: create an online dictionary using only custom definitions. At first, I did some Google searches to see if there were any open-source dictionary apps. No such luck!

Then it occurred to me I should try WordPress. Searching the plugins, I realized that there was no dictionary plugin there either. That’s when I realized that I could set up WordPress itself to run the dictionary entirely.

Organization

I laid out a plan to make sure this would all run smoothly. I would use:

Posts: for definition entries
Custom Fields: to separate definitions, emphasis, etc. (made useful in combination with the “Get Custom Field Values” plugin)
Categories: to create letter listing pages
WP Post Sorting: a plugin to list entries in alphabetical order on letter listing pages
Custom Template: to display the information correctly, in dictionary fashion instead of like a blog

Setting Up

Now that I had my game plan, it was time to prep. I installed WordPress, and set up my categories. I took advantage of nested categories in case I decide to run a blog simultaneously on the site. To do that, I created a “definitions” category, with nested categories running A-Z.

Next, I installed the WP Post Sorting plugin, and set it up so that under the A-Z categories, entries would be listed alphabetically instead of by the usual date order.

Then it was time to set up custom fields. I went over to create a new post. I put in the word to be defined as the title, and skipped the usual post box, scrolling down to the custom fields section. You can use whatever information you want but I created a different field for each of the following:

Definition
Emphasis
Origin
Type (noun/adjective/etc)

Finally, I went to set up the permalinks. You can set it up however you choose, but I used the following settings:

Custom structure:
```
/define/%postname%
```
Category base:
```
list
```
Tag base:
```
tag
```

Creating a custom theme

Creating the theme is pretty simple, once you get the hang of it. If you don’t know how to build a theme, I suggest you learn how first.

I don’t care how you style it, but here are some tips to setting this up:

Install Scott Reilly’s Get Custom Field Valuesplugin, it will make your life easier. Then, all you have to do to pull the custom field is something like the following (used within the loop):
```
php echo c2c_get_custom('definition', ''); ?>
```
Re-write the code that spits out posts. You’re not using the_content(), but we do want to show the definitions of our entries! My code looks like the following:

php the_title(); ?>

/

Origin:

This code should be used pretty much anywhere on the blog that would normally just display the posts.
You’ll probably want to have a “Browse” option showing links for the A-Z categories somewhere. To do this, I simply used the following in header.php:
```
Browse: 
```
Simply substitute the “3″ after child_of with whatever the category ID “Definitions” is on your setup of WordPress, and this will display a list of the A-Z links.

From there on out, you’re on your own! If you have any questions or tips of your own, feel free to leave them in the comments.

If you’re interested, you can check out the finished product at Pugtionary (the dictionary for pugs).

SplashUp: Image Manipulation Online

Anne — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:25:40 +0000

I literally just Stumbled across this nifty little website called SplashUp.com. I must say, I was really impressed! Sites like these really have me looking forward to the future of the web. What if we could edit and share all our images online everywhere we went?

About SplashUp

SplashUp currently holds a “beta” on it’s logo, indicating we can expect a lot of development and improvement as time gos on.

It’s meta description is as follows:

Splashup is the only full-featured, free range, image editor online. Create new images, edit existing images and manipulate layers with filters, layer effects and myriad other drawing and image editing tools.

According to its WhoIs page it is registered privately through Domains by Proxy.

I didn’t have time to extensively test the site for bugs, but upon a quick sweep through it seems simple enough for a first time photo editor, but powerful enough for professionals.

SplashUp in the future

I wonder if sites like SplashUp will continue to remain free? Will we begin replacing programs such as Photoshop? I have seen worse picture editors come installed on computers.

Cool features from SplashUp allow you to share your images through the site itself, or on your Facebook or Flickr accounts.

You can follow their blog for updates here.