First of all, apologies for not posting for a couple of weeks but I had a lovely holiday, thank-you for asking. Back to posting now with this great article on funnelling visitors from your Facebook profile to your blog with a simple hack.

Facebook is great for the less technical amongst my friends, it is email and instant messaging in one handy package. For the rest of us, it’s walled-garden approach can be annoying. I wanted to tell my friends about new blog posts as they happen, much the same way that techies would use an RSS reader.

The answer to this problem is to use Facebook’s Notes application to import an external feed but not to reproduce the content in it’s entirety, just provide a link to entice facebookers to your blog. The results are not great from a usability point of view but they show up in your news feed and people do click through - I think that the less technical are happy to click two or three links to get to their destination.

Here’s an example from my news feed:

I created a Yahoo Pipe to turn this blog’s RSS feed into a much simpler feed that just announces each new post and then imported the results into my Facebook profile. If you want to do the same, it’s easy - the pipe is published and to use it, just enter your blog name and its feed URL. Then grab the results URL and import it into your Facebook profile.

This technique could be adapted in lots of ways - alert your friends when you publish new photos to Flickr, for example. Just be aware that Facebook will only import a single feed via notes, but using the power of Yahoo Pipes, you can easily merge several feeds into one.