Scrape Facebook timeline feed (send to Slack webhook)

Motivation

Every day, before noon, there starts a discussion about the place to go for lunch. And, almost every day, I go to the Facebook page of a local cafe (Cafe Noir, great place BTW) and copy-paste their daily offer to the local office chat.

That chat is hosted on Slack and Slack has a very easy-to-use Webhook API for sending messages to chats. Now, wouldn't it be cool, if there would be a button on that Facebook timeline feed, that would allow me to "forward" the lunch offer straight from Facebook to Slack?

Unfortunately, Facebook does not offer easy access to the timeline feed, so I figured it would be easiest to scrape the message directly from the DOM, using Tampermonkey or other equivalent (I used Tampermonkey).

Also, this was a perfect excuse for me to write some JavaScript.

Quick Start

Grab the script from scrape-facebook-timeline.js, add it to Tampermonkey and customize it for your needs.

You Need More Help?

1. Install Tampermonkey

2. Open up Tampermonkey and create a new script

3. Copy paste the script from scrape-facebook-timeline.js or link it with @requires from your userscript definition.

4. Modify @include URL in the header to match the URL of the Facebook page that you want to scrape

5. Update the constants at the top of the script:

    var slackWebhookUrl = "<insert your Slack webhook URL here>";
    var icon_emoji = ":fork_and_knife:";
    var channel = "@neeme";
   

6. Navigate to the Facebook page and there should be [Post message] buttons next to the [Share] link on each status update.