Resources: Social Media

Generate a Facebook access token

7 June 2013

When building a social media feed, Facebook is the difficult one to work with as it uses higher-level API access. You can get away without using the API if you're happy with the low-res thumbnail graphics, but if you want nice, high res graphics you'll need to do the following:

  1. Register as an App Developer
    http://developers.facebook.com/apps
  2. Create an App
    http://developers.facebook.com/apps
  3. Generate an access_token
     
    https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id=YOUR_APP_ID&client_secret=YOUR_APP_SECRET&grant_type=client_credentials
  4. Use this access_token to construct your feed URL
     
    https://graph.facebook.com/YOUR_PAGE_ID/feed?access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN

You can now use your constructed URL to grab a JSON-formatted feed from your wall! Bear in mind cross-domain access limitations with javascript calls like this. Personally I digest the JSON feed using PHP functionality:

json_decode( get_file_contents(URL HERE), true)

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