This past week Facebook added a new method on their REST server for sending news and mini feed stories. The method is “feed.publishTemplatizedAction” and the intent of this method is to replace the existing “feed.publishActionOfUser” with a method that is more “templatized”. Here is a sample we created which is a combination of static text and data we gathered from a RSS feed. When a users first installs our application we will publish this news story.

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actor_id: 555555555
title_template:   {actor} <fb:if-multiple-actors>are<fb:else>is</fb:else>
           </fb:if-multiple-actors> exploring the web’s premier collection of 
            student-produced digital media Made on a Mac. 
title_data: 
body_template: <b>"{title}"</b> Made by <i>{author}</i>  
           - See it at the <a href="http://url/item.php?itemID={id}">
           Apple Student Gallery</a> 
body_data: {"title":"Lost", "author":"Jared A. Jaworski","id":13243} 
body_general: 
image_1: http://url/resize3.php?image=/109.jpg 
image_1_link: http://url/resize4.php?image=/109.jpg 
target_ids:

As illustrated in the sample, if multiple users publish stories where both the title_template and body_template markup strings are identical, as well as the title_data and body_data arrays, then Facebook may aggregated the stories together. When this occurs, the {actor} token is replaced with the names of all of the users whose actions are being aggregated. Also note, that the only valid HTML tags supported in the template is the <a>, <b> and <i>.

For more information check out Facebooks wiki at Feed.publishTemplatizedAction

For those of you who have embarked on writing a Facebook app, you may have faced the challenge of how to automatically update your profile fbml without forcing a user to take action. The approach I have found most effective is to use the <fbml:ref> tag. Facebook defines this command as a tag which “fetches and renders FBML from a given ref source – either a ref string “handle” you’ve created using fbml.setRefHandle or a URL that serves FBML. ” When using “fbml.setRefHandle” Facebook stores this FBML on its servers in the form of a hashtable. Using a single push we can update FBML for all users that have our application installed.

For a recent client we were asked to display the first few entries from a RSS feed within a users profile. All Facebook users would see the same entries, until the RSS feed changed. Here is the PHP we used to set a users FBML.

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function render_ref_fbml($uid, $rssItems) { 
  global $facebook; 
  try { 
    // Set FBML Cache 
    $refFbml = render_narrow_fbml($id, $rssItems); 
    $refFbml .= render_wide_fbml($id, $rssItems); 
    $facebook->api_client->fbml_setRefHandle('RssFbml',$refFbml); 
    // Set Profile FBML 
    $fbml = render_css_style(); 
    $fbml .= '<fb:ref handle="RssFbml">'; 
    $facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML($fbml, $uid); 
    } catch (Exception $e) { 
      error_log($e->getMessage()); 
    } 
}

In a standalone php file we then created a similar function which updated only the FBML stored under the “RssFbml” handle.

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function render_ref($rssItems) { 
  global $facebook; 
  try { 
    // Set FBML Cache 
    $refFbml = render_narrow_fbml(0, $rssItems); 
    $refFbml .= render_wide_fbml(0, $rssItems); 
    $facebook->api_client->fbml_setRefHandle('RssFbml',$refFbml); 
  } catch (Exception $e) { 
    error_log($e->getMessage()); 
  } 
}

This php file uses an infinite Facebook session and is called every 30 min by a CRON job.

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30 * * * * php -f /var/www/rss.php