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Reformat your Facebook RSS Blog feed into a clean-formatted excerpt with backlink to your Blog

By • Sep 18th, 2009 • Category: Tutorials

""Despite the fact that I frequently praise Facebook's built-in RSS reader.... it is surprisingly lean on features""

Despite the fact that I frequently praise Facebook’s built-in RSS reader for being one of the best ways to integrate WordPress posts into Facebook, it is surprisingly lean on features and customizability.  You are basically given the ability to add your Blog’s RSS feed, and manually update posts as you write them.  In addition, the resulting post to your Notes page is thin, confusing, and cluttered since it displays the entire post, minus embedded videos and such.  You aren’t given the option to collapse your posts into excerpts, or to choose excerpt length or linking options. In addition, the “View Original Post” link is pretty buried, so most people will naturally comment on Facebook, if they can find the comment box at all.

Clean on design, lean on features

Facebook's Wall RSS Feed: clean on design, lean on features

But help is at hand!  There is a new WordPress plugin called Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook.  The aim of this plugin is to get your Facebook readers back to your blog as painlessly as possible. It integrates with your Feed and with Facebook’s readers in an easy and elegant way.  Just install the plugin and append ?feedfacebook to your feed url. That gives the default excerpt and link on your Notes page (see below). You are also given the option to customize the link text (you just edit feed-facebook.php with a text editor – do a “Find” to get to the text and then edit it).  You can also provide users with a reason why you are sending them to your blog (check the plugin’s help page for how).  All in all it’s a great deal and if the plugin developers have gotten this far in one month, than imagine what can happen in the future. It’s a great way to harness the power of Facebook’s built-in features, but with the ability to customize and edit the layout.

Adding the appended text to your feed

Adding the appended text to your feed

Resulting excerpt posted to Notes

Resulting excerpt posted to Notes

Go to Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook
Documentation – including how to customize the layout even further

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  • http://www.i-need-a-rant.co.uk Abi

    Hi

    Great Plugin, just what i needed, just one problem. I formatted my link as http://www.i-need-a-rant.co.uk/feed/?feedfacebook… My Website to Read More Rants! On facebook the link just shows "Visit" rather than the full sentence. I got round it by putting hyphens in the link like http://www.i-need-a-rant.co.uk/feed/?feedfacebook… Website-to-Read-More-Rants!

    It appears the plugin crops the text at spaces?

    • http://www.jnote.org Jaems

      Hmm, to be honest, I stopped using this plugin, though it was fine. I opted for Facebook’s Social RSS instead. But if I recall, you could edit the plugin’s php file to include your entire “visit my website…” text. You’ve also got the “Read More” showing, so you have two links to your blog post. That’s reason enough to go tweak the php file, because Im sure that the “Read More” is located there. Find it with ctrl or Apple-F, then replace it with your own text.

  • http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog risto h. kurppa

    Abi: change it to ?feedfacebook=Visit+my+blog+to+see+more