myspace RSS feeds to save time

earlier today i was doing laundry and watching C-SPAN. i don't have cable at home, so when i go to do laundry at my dad's house, i take the opportunity to watch some cable, and i usually end up watching C-SPAN, which is ironically available online.

on C-SPAN today was eric brende, the author of better off: flipping the switch on technology. he talked about how a lot of "time-saving" technology actually makes us lose time because we have to spend time working to pay for it, and then we have to schedule seperate time for exercising and socializing, both of which we previously did simultaneously with whatever work the technology is now performing for us.

that all made sense to me, so i of course went home and started working on yet another web application to save myself some time. my friend jj has a new weblog on myspace.com, but myspace.com doesn't have RSS feeds. i'd like to know when jj writes something without having to waste a few minutes every day checking this page, so i wrote a script to scrape the page and make an RSS feed. i think that took me a little over an hour, so this may be a good example of where "time-saving" doesn't.

but i made it so it will work on any myspace.com weblog, so hopefully i can save someone else enough time that this was worthwhile. if you want an RSS feed of the weblog of the lead singer of weezer, for example, you can get that here. or you could just read the web page, but if you're not going to use perfectly good RSS, you might as well become amish.

Posted by Scott Reynen on Dec 26, 2004 — 5:13 pm | 106 comments | Tags: myspace rss

Thanks i was googling for myspace RSS and i found this much appreciation!

wormeyman on Jan 2, 2005 – 1:47 am

Thank you! Myspace's lack of RSS is quite irritating, and this should be quite useful.

bpt on Jan 9, 2005 – 8:17 pm

great link! adding this to my rss reader. I do however get an error on a friends blog. here's the link.

http://weblog.randomchaos.com/myspace.php?myspace=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.myspace.com%2Findex.cfm%3Ffuseaction%3Dblog.ListAll%26friendID=5391884

am i doing something wrong?

LEON on Jan 24, 2005 – 10:55 am

LEON, there was an error in the script, which i corrected. it should work now.

scott reynen on Jan 24, 2005 – 8:19 pm

you are the man. thank you.

LEON on Jan 26, 2005 – 9:51 am

yeah, fuck the Amish

ken on Feb 25, 2005 – 10:06 pm

How bout a rss feed for comments?

michael on Mar 22, 2005 – 5:06 pm

michael, thanks for the suggestion. See this:

http://weblog.randomchaos.com/myspace/comments/

scott reynen on Mar 24, 2005 – 9:04 pm

thanks.. awesome i'll prob be using it on my site.. entrauge.com

michael.. on Mar 26, 2005 – 3:19 pm

Actually.. There is a bug on the comment parser.
Some of the comments are getting thrown out and some have the wrong name. :(

Michael on Mar 26, 2005 – 4:17 pm

michael, thanks for letting me know about the bug. it should be fixed now.

scott reynen on Mar 26, 2005 – 9:26 pm

Thanks so much

madrid on Mar 26, 2005 – 10:38 pm

Is it just that I'm doing something wrong or does this script only recognize one blog entry per day?

Adam on Mar 29, 2005 – 5:21 pm

Adam, that sounds like an error, but I can't find a myspace blog that has more than one entry per day to test on. If you can point me to one, I'll try to figure out what's wrong.

scott reynen on Mar 29, 2005 – 7:29 pm

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=12215935&Mytoken=20050330170415

Adam on Mar 29, 2005 – 8:07 pm

Adam, thanks for the test blog. It should work now.

scott reynen on Mar 30, 2005 – 9:04 pm

i used RSSOwl...works great. have to use escape characters in the parameter to you php, tho. but beats logging into myspace. thanks! :> /.

metafedora on Apr 7, 2005 – 10:10 pm

i hate all of you scrubs

richard on Apr 20, 2005 – 1:59 pm

Is there anyway that I can use this to feed a blog on another website?

rory on May 12, 2005 – 3:12 pm

rory, yes, but I'd need more detail about what kind of site and if you have any programming ability to explain the best way to do that.

scott reynen on May 12, 2005 – 10:09 pm

I've added you as a friend on MSN IM, if we could talk about it on there it would be much easier.

Rory on May 12, 2005 – 11:12 pm

I've added you as a friend on MSN IM, if we could talk about it on there it would be much easier.

Rory on May 12, 2005 – 11:15 pm

hi

can u please share php code to scrape mysapce

simon on Jun 28, 2005 – 10:48 am

simon, see the "open source" link at the bottom of every page.

Scott Reynen on Jun 28, 2005 – 11:33 am

pk. i got the script
but do you think ur script ur work
if user change his blog display settings like
including html,css etc

simon on Jun 29, 2005 – 3:08 am

I only know it works on the few dozen MySpace blogs I've tested it on, but if you discover any problems, I'll be happy to fix them.

Scott Reynen on Jun 29, 2005 – 8:25 am

how about the reverse? how can you get a blog hosted elsewhere with rss feed to show up on a myspace account?

missy on Jul 22, 2005 – 11:24 am

missy, as far as I know, MySpace doesn't allow entering posts programatically, so you would have to do that yourself.

Scott Reynen on Jul 22, 2005 – 12:43 pm

I have no idea how this works. I have no programming skills. Can you explain step-by-step how to get a rss feeder of my blog on myspace.com?

Monica on Jul 29, 2005 – 3:34 pm

Monica, here are the steps:

1) Go to the MySpace blog
2) Copy the address
3) Go to the script linked above
4) Paste the address
5) Click the button
6) Subscribe in your news reader

Scott Reynen on Jul 30, 2005 – 6:32 pm

thanks a lot!

sean on Aug 4, 2005 – 9:06 am

Thanks Scott

Monica on Aug 24, 2005 – 8:57 am

Howdy! MySpace changed some of the elements on their blog system. There's an additional field (currently listening/gaming/reading/etc.), and it messes up the parser... Is there a patch that can be applied to fix that?

John on Sep 1, 2005 – 12:47 am

Myspace has added rss feeds into their blogs now, so I'll be using the internal feed. But I wanted to thank you for making such a great script that lasted me for so long. Great work Scott!

Brendan on Sep 6, 2005 – 11:24 pm

John, I believe the feed should work now. If it doesn't, let me know the account name/number and I'll try to fix it.

Scott Reynen on Sep 10, 2005 – 3:59 pm

Is there a way to feed a non-myspace blog to your myspace blog? As in, can I feed my livejournal entries directly to myspace?

Mia on Oct 12, 2005 – 1:49 pm

Mia, see my response about to missy, who asked the same question.

Scott Reynen on Oct 15, 2005 – 2:08 pm

Yep, it did. But it doesn't work again. PHP error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_date() in /home/smreynen/public_html/weblog/myspace/index.php on line 75

I'm guessing that your php version was updated?

John on Oct 28, 2005 – 11:48 pm

I'm not sure what exactly changed, John, but it's fixed not.

Scott Reynen on Oct 29, 2005 – 9:42 am

i dont know.. everytime i try to use it i get "Sorry, there was an error loading the MySpace comments" why is this

Jordan on Nov 8, 2005 – 9:42 pm

Jordan, give me the comments URL (address) you're trying to use, and I'll look at it.

Scott Reynen on Nov 8, 2005 – 10:46 pm

Doesn't seem to work on my blog.
http://blog.myspace.com/spazspaz

The application seems to not work on my server either.
http://www.onesevensolutions.com/myspace.php5

I'm using source from:
http://www.randomchaos.com/source/?source=http%3A%2F%2Fweblog.randomchaos.com%2Fmyspace%2Fstandalone.php

Here's my phpinfo():
http://www.onesevensolutions.com/php5config.php5

David on Nov 18, 2005 – 3:24 am

hey Scott, there seems to be a problem with the parsing engine on my blog. my blog is not customized in any particular fashion, but it fails to parse the data period. so for testing, i went ahead and put more blog entries in and then it failed to display the first blog entry, but passed and displayed the remaining test messages. it should be noted that my blog currently contains only one entry. i will examine the PHP code and see if i may be able to determine the source of error. my blog site is at:
http://blog.myspace.com/spazspaz

David on Nov 18, 2005 – 5:50 pm

David, looks like your blog has categories, which don't currently work with the parser. I'll try to update it when I get a chance. Meanwhile, you could always use the abbreviated feeds provided by MySpace.

Scott Reynen on Nov 27, 2005 – 8:55 am

can u do the same rss for a the www.downelink.com blog

q on Feb 6, 2006 – 10:40 am

q, no, downelink is a closed community, so I couldn't easily access it from a script. But the script is open source if you'd like to try.

Scott Reynen on Feb 6, 2006 – 2:43 pm

Your code seems to parse based on table element order. Point being, it doesn't seem to work on pages with a top8 override.

Rob the SLob on Mar 24, 2006 – 3:49 am

Rob, I have no idea what top8 override means. Can you provide an example page? In general, my code is dependent on MySpace maintaining consistant HTML formatting throughout the site. When the formatting changes, my code breaks. I don't work for MySpace, so I have no control over this.

Scott Reynen on Mar 24, 2006 – 11:34 am

Interesting. There are some sites out there like www.ribix.com that automatically aggregate alot of rss feeds to be viewed in a web browser. They have some really interesting stuff.

Leroy on Mar 27, 2006 – 12:47 pm

Scott, do you think you could provide an open source version of your script? I would like to edit it around a little. Give you full credit of course :)

Thanks,
Steve

Steve on Mar 31, 2006 – 11:07 am

for the comment rss that is :)

Steve on Mar 31, 2006 – 11:07 am

Steve, the link at the bottom of every page on my site, the one that says "open source," that links to the, well, open source.

Scott Reynen on Mar 31, 2006 – 11:34 am

Hey, does anyone happen to know how to post a comment on all of your friend's pages? I actually found a Perl script to do it, but I honestly don't feel like setting up my pc to do it. (yeah I'm lazy)

Tony on Apr 7, 2006 – 10:45 pm

i noticed if the friend id isnt iserted into the links , all the links that the feed trys to link ot the actual myspace blog wont work. it needs the persons friend id inserted into the link and the generator doesnt seem to insert it in there.

Aaron on Apr 17, 2006 – 5:36 am

You can also import RSS feeds into MySpace using a tool I wrote that turns them into images - www.myspacefeed.com

Aaron K on May 20, 2006 – 7:56 pm

Were do i find some new MS layouts?

Thanks,
Steve

Steve L. on May 21, 2006 – 2:17 pm

Do you have time to discuss a new project, outside of myspace but still on the subject of RSS?

Dinog@LTbrokers.com on Jun 4, 2006 – 1:50 am

Dinog, I tried emailing you and the message bounced. If you want to discuss a project, email me.

Scott Reynen on Jun 4, 2006 – 5:23 pm

Question is, how to make RSS work for the blog poster in myspace? I've been look around but non has a layman term and simple explanation for dummy like me.

want to learn on Jun 9, 2006 – 5:49 pm

want to learn, I'm not clear on what you're asking. What specifically do you want to do?

Scott Reynen on Jun 11, 2006 – 1:15 pm

LOVE IT ! ...One question though , how can I make it display all my blogs , It is only showing 10 , may be my reader in Safari ...
feed://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=48552345

Ada on Jun 15, 2006 – 2:54 am

Ada, MySpace only shows 10 posts per page, so that's all you get in the feed.

Scott Reynen on Jun 15, 2006 – 8:40 am

Thanks , yes I figured that in order to display more than one post in the myspacemusic blogs , one has to make the blog settings to display 10 posts per page . I assume it is the same on all the blog systems on myspace . So if you have the settings of the blog to display each post in a separate page , for some reason the RSS only displays the listing of the first post . In order to display at least the 10 allotted by myspace , one has to make the blog display the max (10) posts per page . I hope this makes sense .
Either way it is awesome and I am spreading the word . Thanks again . feed://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=48588356

Ada on Jun 15, 2006 – 4:35 pm

Does anyone know how to put the bottom links inside the profile, rather than underneath? Or get ride of them fully.

Jessica on Jun 19, 2006 – 8:05 pm

PS. an example is

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=14860351

on Jun 19, 2006 – 8:08 pm

Hum. This is kind of the OPPOSITE of what I want to do. I want to post to my LJ blog and feed the RSS to my Myspace blog... unless anyone knows an easier way to duplicate post to Myspace FROM LJ???

Kudos to all the good work!

shaun of the dead on Jun 21, 2006 – 9:39 am

How hard would it be to alter this script so it created an rss feed for myspace bands and there upcoming gigs?

Ryno on Jul 11, 2006 – 1:12 am

Ryno, I'll put that on my lengthy to-do list. If you'd like it moved to the top of the list, I accept freelance work.

Scott Reynen on Jul 11, 2006 – 5:14 pm

MySpace has built-in RSS feeds *points to HTML for blog*

See? Works dandy.

Joe on Jul 26, 2006 – 6:06 pm

Joe, MySpace added RSS feeds after I made my feed tool. I try to avoid reinventing wheels. I've kept my feeds up because MySpace's feeds are still only the first few lines of each post, so they don't do as much as my full-text feeds. But if they work for you, you should use them because my feeds are dependent on their HTML formatting, which is likely to change without notice at some point and break the feeds (though I'll certainly fix them as long as I can).

Scott Reynen on Jul 26, 2006 – 6:37 pm

Oh! Mmkay. I popped my feeds into Thunderbird and set it to automatically download the URL associated with an entry. Sorry to be a bother.

on Jul 27, 2006 – 10:08 am

myspace has rss?

willszz on Jul 31, 2006 – 6:39 pm

Yes, MySpace has RSS. If you open any "view all" blog listing, there's a link at the top.

Scott Reynen on Jul 31, 2006 – 7:34 pm

What about atom?

mathiastck on Aug 4, 2006 – 6:00 pm

My page is hidden so it can't read the blog. How do I fix?

Namorbrowneeyes on Aug 6, 2006 – 1:41 am

Namorbrowneeyes, I can't help you with hidden content because I can't see it. That's what "hidden" means.

Scott Reynen on Aug 6, 2006 – 2:45 am

Please forgive me if this has been covered, but I'd like to display a blog on my myspace page DIRECTLY (without having to follow their link);in fact, I'd like to eliminate those areas altogether and display only the actual blog. Is this possible? Is that the idea of RSS?

emil on Aug 9, 2006 – 2:36 am

emil, if you need help with what's on your MySpace page, you should ask MySpace about it. I'm making tools that allow take content you created on MySpace and use it elsewhere.

Scott Reynen on Aug 9, 2006 – 1:21 pm

Scott,. i want to add the "boingboing" (boingboing.com) rss feed to my myspace page,. is this possible? whether it be in the blog section or the main page,. could you explain to me how to do this? if its possible..

Mario on Sep 8, 2006 – 12:45 pm

The comment RSS feeder doesnt work, it crashes.

Jason on Sep 8, 2006 – 6:03 pm

Mario, I already answered that. I guess it's time to make a FAQ.

Jason, what blog are you trying? It crashes your browser or is there an error message? I need more detail to solve a problem.

Scott Reynen on Sep 13, 2006 – 9:33 pm

does anyone know how to add rss to a my myspace page from my blog
http://myspace.com/justbthat. Please Help me

justbthat on Sep 25, 2006 – 9:06 pm

Hi. Is there anyway that you can create an rss feed for the upcoming shows from a bands myspace? As this would save me hours of time adding new shows in multiple places! this would be much appriciated. please let me know at:

mail(at)dankingsley(dot)co(dot)uk

Thanks.

Dan Kingsley on Sep 29, 2006 – 8:40 am

Dan, that's on my to-do list. If you're interested in funding the work, you can easily move it up my to-do list. Otherwise, I'll let you know when I get to it.

Scott Reynen on Sep 29, 2006 – 9:49 am

Trying create an RSS feed to Myspace from Yahoo 360. This is what I entered and I get an error...
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=55796884

Monica on Oct 4, 2006 – 1:47 am

Hello, is there a feed for MySpace event dates too? Thanks

Max on Oct 15, 2006 – 6:24 pm

Sorry I am brand new at all of this, and I know everyone has little patience with newbies, but here is what I've got... I have a blog at http://blog.familydobes.com that I want to synicate over to my blog at myspace so I can update just one and have it show both places. It sounds simple enough can someone help me?

stephen Parsons on Oct 19, 2006 – 1:51 pm

I doubt I'll ever use this, but Scott's the man... just for answering the same questions over and over so patiently. Seriously. Bravo.

Eric on Oct 22, 2006 – 11:37 pm

That is one of the coolest things I've seen lately...thanks for sharing it!

Scott Kuhn on Oct 28, 2006 – 12:28 am

My question is inline to what "Scott Reynen" was asking but I couldn't follow the conversation on here. Is there a way to insert a RSS feed READER into ur myspace profile page so that viewers can see an RSS feed from another source on my page?

Jessie Westlake on Oct 30, 2006 – 1:43 am

Im retarted I didn't realize that the person who posted the comments name was BELOW the comment, therefore I didn't understand anything that was going on... Sorry scott, lol

Jessie Westlake on Oct 30, 2006 – 1:47 am

*Answer* I've got a flash news feed on my myspace running off of an xml file located on my server. Go to http://www.myspace.com/butterflyfoundation to check it out. This is fed off of a file located at http://www.ebarts.com/darfur/news.xml (I will provide you the source code if you can volunteer some of your time to help me with another rss feed to flash project I am currently working on. This program incorporates pulling an rss yahoo news feed onto a flash program compatible to myspace profiles. Thanks - Brian

Brian on Nov 17, 2006 – 7:45 am

Hey Brian, that's pretty slick. Send me an email with more details of what you need if you want to talk about some sort of code exchange.

Scott Reynen on Nov 17, 2006 – 9:12 am

Did you try Anothr.com to get just-in-time alert with Myspace RSS via Skype chat?

IM on Dec 18, 2006 – 2:03 am

Hi! does any here knows how to reverse table column for downelink page?? will be much appreciated.. thnx!

roxy on Jan 21, 2007 – 2:50 pm

I'm not using the script, but Scott, you are my new hero, simply for answering everyone's questions and providing all your stuff open-source...and I like this comment format.

Andrew on Jul 30, 2007 – 11:43 pm

so you say this is open source eh? I dont see the link for the source, maybe I'm just blind. This is perfect for me, since the guy I do a site for hates to post his tour dates in two locations. I just want the source for http://makedatamakesense.com/myspace/event/ so I can tweak it a little bit.
:0)
Thanks in advance.
Kirk
http://www.jeffellismusic.com

jeffellismusic.com on Aug 23, 2007 – 5:38 pm

Sorry Kirk, I no longer host the source code for the weblog stuff (this post is almost three years old), and the event stuff was never open source. If you have general interest tweaks, I'd be happy to make them myself so everyone can use them. Otherwise, you're on your own.

Scott Reynen on Aug 23, 2007 – 9:18 pm

bummer. i just want to make sure that it will always be up and the be able to customize the date output.. well mainly the output in general. this is the best script i have found to do this, so i would really like to get it to work, plus allow visitors to get an rss feed of it at the our domain instead of yours.... no offense you know how it is.

let me know what we can do / work out passably.

kirk

kirk on Sep 4, 2007 – 1:50 pm

kirk, a lot of people have asked for that and my main hesitation has been figuring out how to quickly distribute updates every time MySpace updates their HTML and breaks the scripts. But I'm going to revisit that over the next couple weeks and hopefully come up with a solution you can use. I'll publish that here when it's available.

Scott Reynen on Sep 5, 2007 – 10:20 pm

100

Man this is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thanks!

Jeff P on Oct 20, 2007 – 2:47 pm

101

KUDOS to Scott Reynen for providing his time & effort. As you can see from the posts, there is interest in your code. Everyone seems to appreciate your selflessness! Way To Go!!!
DJ X~Cel

DJ X~Cel on Dec 12, 2007 – 7:41 am

102

I CAN BE NUMBA ONE OH THREE

bibyboo on Mar 1, 2008 – 4:21 pm

103

ME AGAIN I WANT A HUMBUGA SAMMY

bibbyboo, again on Mar 1, 2008 – 4:22 pm

104

still waiting on that hambuga

bibbyboo, my patience is being tested. on Mar 1, 2008 – 4:22 pm

105

i'm doing a site for my friend's band and this is perfect. mush appreciated

jy on Oct 8, 2008 – 3:01 pm

106

typewriting