RSS Cumulus conditions and Facebook

[kingqueen]

I got sick of the flaky (at best) Twitter to Facebook integration and so decided to update Facebook independently by RSS. I thought it might potentially be of use to somebody else so I thought I'd put it here.

It is relatively easy to create a RSS feed for the current conditions using the Webtags facility. I attach a genericised version of what I use. You'd need to edit this to put in your web address and email address where indicated, and choose a Time To Live (how long subscribing services should wait before checking for new items.) Then tell Cumulus to process and upload it. The result is a one entry RSS feed. Mine is at http://www.wetherbyweather.org.uk/cumulus.rss

Then use a RSS feed to Facebook service. I use RSS Graffiti https://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/ . Add http://www.yourwebsite/path/to/cumulus.rss as a source, and select your profile or page as the destination. I tell mine to update every hour, and to use Standard post style, no "Text to Box", with 0 (no) in Shorten to.

It works; I get the current conditions posted on my Wetherby Weather Facebook page every hour.

It is possible to doctor what I've done and use a linux or PHP script to create a true RSS Cumulus conditions feed with multiple entries. To do this, I have a file 1.txt with all the elements up to but not including the first <item>, uploaded to the webspace. I have a 2.txt which consists of the <item> ... </item> section, which Cumulus processes and uploads. Then I have 3.txt on the webspace, which consists of solely </channel></rss>.

I have a Linux shell script uploaded to the server. It concatenates 2.txt and 2.existing.txt back into 2.existing.txt and then crops the last <item></item> using tail 60 lines, so that 2.existing.txt always contains a set number of <item>s. The script then concatenates 1.txt, 2.existing.txt and 3.txt into feed.rss . A cron job runs this shortly after every hour so the conditions on the hour are added as an item to the RSS feed.

It is also possible to post WXSIM forecasts to Facebook automatically using Ken's WXSIM RSS feed script at http://saratoga-weather.org/scripts-WXS ... aintextRSS and RSS Graffiti.

[inaciovieira]

Hi, i tried to put the current conditions on fecabook but it isin´t posting it on facebook with RSS grafiiti it dosen´t work, with dlvr it works

[Stuart5646]

Hi,

Sorry to open a query on this, I'm new to all this and having a bit of a play with all the settings but where do you save the cumulus.rss file to in the installation and how do you get Cumulus to process it?

I've set it in file settings but all that seems to get loaded to my webpage is the script itself

kind regards

Stuart

[gluepack]

Having only just succumbed to Facebook, I was interested in incorporating details from my weather website or Cumulus into my page. Except it is not a "page" by their apparent definition, it is only a timeline ( ? I think, lol). Does that preclude me from doing something like this?