Connecting Your Blog to Facebook: Updated

A few weeks ago I wrote an arti­cle on “How to Con­nect Your Blog to Face­book.” Face­book is designed around con­ver­sa­tion so pub­lish­ing your post there is an easy way to cre­ate  inter­ac­tion with your friends and bring­ing the com­ments back makes it very easy to share your friends insights with the world. In that arti­cle I high­lighted a cou­ple of plu­gin to help out. While those plu­gin work well I’ve since dis­cov­ered some new tech­niques that I feel do a bet­ter job.

Import­ing posts into Face­book as Notes

It turns out that Face­book can do this out of the box with no extra plu­g­ins needed.
Login to Facebook

Go to www.facebook.com/notes.php

Click the “Import Blog” link on the right side of the page

Enter your blog’s RSS feed into the “Web URL” text box and click “Start Import­ing“

Sync Face­book com­ments back to WordPress

Sync­ing the com­ments back can be a lit­tle tricky. Face­book does not have an API for retriev­ing com­ments so it is more or less screen scrap­ing. This means any­time Face­book updates their HTML (Which they do often!) it requires a change in how the com­ments are retrieved mak­ing this a mov­ing tar­get. The best plu­gin I have found so far is called Face­book Com­mentsTNG. It’s still very early in devel­op­ment (it was updated 43 hours ago) and it’s a semi-manual process but it works beau­ti­fully! Update: The devel­oper has added in a timer so that it will run automatically

Allow peo­ple to leave com­ments using their Face­book Con­nect account.

I have switched my com­ment sys­tem to ECHO from the guys at js-kit.com and it han­dles this for me but if you want to use the stan­dard Word­Press com­ment­ing sys­tem there is a plu­gin for you! WP-FacebookConnect will add a Face­book Con­nect icon that will allow peo­ple to sign in and use their Face­book avatar in their com­ments.