Display your Travellerspoint blog on Facebook

Update 19 November 2009 As this article was becoming quite out of date, I've moved it into the wiki where it will be easier to update if/when Facebook make design changes on their end.

Go to the new How to Display your Travel Blog on Facebook article.

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As I've quickly noticed after signing up on Facebook, it's addictive. I've also bumped into (read: poked and been poked by) quite a few Travellerspoint members and if that isn't enough, there's now even an 'official' Travellerspoint group on Facebook (hint hint, join us ). So, imagine my surprise when with just a tiny bit of playing around I found you can quite easily have your blog automatically added within your profile every time you make an entry! That's pretty cool, because let's face it, you might have some friends on Facebook that don't visit Travellerspoint (although of course you have many more the other way around, right?!) but you'd still would like them to see what you're up to and be able to leave comments.

Here's the break down:

1. After you've logged in to Facebook, head over to your "Notes" area. This can be accessed through the Applications list on the left side of the page, or you can get there using the drop down box at the top right hand side of your profile page:

Once there, click on the "Import a Blog" link:

That will bring up the page in the image below, where you need to enter the domain name you wish to import notes from. For my personal blog, I entered http://sam-i-am.travellerspoint.com/ (you can also add /rss.xml to the end of this, but it shouldn't be necessary). Accept the Facebook conditions by ticking the box and hit Start Importing.

Facebook will do its thing and give you the following preview notice:

Hit the "Confirm Import" button on the right and your latest blog entries are all imported!

So, what does this mean really? This should mean your friends see your notes as they are entered/imported. Not just on your profile, but on their own pages (if you haven't blocked this) as part of what their friends are doing on Facebook. Here's a few random screenshots of places where my notes displayed on my own page:

within the minifeed

within the minifeed - the first time you import it will bring in the last ten entries

in the notes section of your profile (go figure! )

See how in the last image some of my friends have actually left a comment on the entry, directly within Facebook. Pretty cool and as you can see, easy to do.

Okay, so now for some current (temporary) issues. Because you are uploading your feed, it is limited to the last 10 entries only, although of course all future entries will be included automatically (Facebook checks every now and then for new entries). Also, the entries are currently not imported in their entirety, again because this is the default in the feeds. This means friends have to click on the link in your notes to take them to your blog and view the entry there (not a disaster, since it looks better that way too!). Fixing up how much of an entry is included in the feed has been on our 'to do' list to fix and I am pretty sure has just jumped up the list quite a bit with this post

UPDATE: This has now been fixed and if you have set your blog to generate a full feed, the entire blog entry will show in Facebook, including photos. For some reason Facebook seems to be blocking out the videos and maps at this time but they are included in the feed, so this is a Facebook thing.

All in all, it's very easy to do and once you've done it once, you don't have to do it again. If you have a lot of Facebook friends and don't want to keep them all guessing what you are blogging about or send them an email asking them to check out your blog, set up your profile to import your blog posts and you're sure to get a lot more readers in one go!