facebook_wall¶ ↑

facebook_wall is a simple library that fetches the latest wall-posts for a Facebook page without having to log in - wall posts are taken from the page’s RSS feed. The markup in posts is filtered to help ensure standards-compliance and prevent errors when inserted into your own Web pages.

Requirements¶ ↑

facebook_wall was written and tested on Ruby 1.9.2 but is likely to work on other versions. It requires no 3rd-party libraries - it uses the open-uri and RSS libs from the Standard Library.

Installation¶ ↑

Using Bundler:

gem 'facebook_wall'

or:

gem 'facebook_wall', :git => 'git://github.com/archaichorizon/ruby-facebook-wall.git'

Usage¶ ↑

The following example prints the latest wall-post from Archaic Horizon’s Facebook page.

require 'facebook_wall'

facebook_wall_posts = FacebookWall::posts_by 260041833284
latest_wall_post = facebook_wall_posts.first

puts latest_wall_post.description

FacebookWall::posts_by returns an Array containing instances of FacebookWall::Post. FacebookWall::Post decorates RSS::Rss::Channel::Item, which means you can easily access all sub-elements of items published in a page’s feed. For example:

post.title        # => A title automatically generated by Facebook
post.link         # => The URL of the wall post
post.description  # => The content of the wall post
post.pubDate      # => The date the post was published
post.author       # => The author of the post

Filters¶ ↑

The library applies two filters to each item in the feed:

• FacebookWall::FeedEntryFilters::LinkRewriter completely rewrites HTML links in items, removing superfluous attributes added by Facebook.

• FacebookWall::FeedEntryFilters::Paragraphizer wraps ‘plain’ paragraphs with P tags to create semantically-correct HTML.

You can insert your own filters into the chain by adding subclasses of FacebookWall::FeedEntryFilters::FeedEntryFilter to the FacebookWall::FeedEntryFilters module. The following filter, for example, would append the word “foo” to the description of each item.

module FacebookWall
  module FeedEntryFilters
    class CustomFilter < FeedEntryFilter
      def apply!(feed_entry)
        feed_entry.description << 'foo'
      end
    end
  end
end