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Frequently Asked Questions »

What is fubnub?

fubnub is a simple tool to help you reformat and republish feeds from lots of different sources and services to your blog or email.

Why would I want to fubnub a feed?

1. fubnub is a great way to wrap Twitter tweets, Tumbler logs, Last.fm feeds, and other micro-blog like posts into one larger blog post or email.

2. It's also a great way to generate link list posts and other summary posts from your RSS feeds.

3. You define the details of the template you apply to your feed. This means, without having to learn any programming, you can apply all sorts of nifty designs and additional content to your feeds.

How do I fubnub a feed?

It's actually very simple! The basic steps are:

How do I tell fubnub to publish my feed?

Right now there are a couple of different ways to publish a feed »

A fubnub example in action »

This example shows you the basic flow you go through to fubnub your last.fm recent tracks.

Your raw feed looks like this

=>

Your direct tweet to fubnub d fubnub #plrt My recent last.fm tracks!

=>

Your new blog post looks like this

What commands can I Tweet?

Once you are following fubnub via Twitter, you can direct tweet fubnub with any of the following publish commands (assuming you have that type of feed set up for fubnub'ing of course).

Note: Anything following the publish command will be used as the title of your blog post or email (in the examples below our explanations would be our subjects).

What's involved in setting up a feed?

1.	Pick the type of feed you want to be able to fubnub. Currently you can fubnub your Twitter timeline, a variety of your last.fm feeds, and any RSS 2.0 compliant feed (and we are working on more each day).

2.	Provide the details about accessing your feed. For example, if you want to fubnub your Twitter timeline, you need to specify your Twitter ID.

3.	Define the details about how you want your fubnub'ed feed delivered. Currently you can have your fubnub'ed feeds delivered to your email or posted directly to any MetaWebLog compatible XML-RPC service that you have credentials for.

4.	Pick a template you want applied to your feed when you publish.

What is a Template?

Templates are what gets applied to your feeds when you trigger a publish action.

What are Template Sections?

You can break templates up into logical sections by defining the sections with special tags that look like the following:

[ === SECTION 1 === ]

Sections headers, like the one above, will not render in your actual feed and are only used internally by the fubnub bots. You can use any value you like to reference a section header so long as you use the format of [ === XYZ === ] (where XYZ is whatever value you want to use).

The one exception is [ === BODY === ] which is what fubnub uses internally to know what section to apply to each item in your feed. This means that if you do define sections, you must make sure to define a [ === BODY === ] section that you want to apply to your each item in your feed (otherwise you'll just get your basic template back without any data from your feed injected into it).

If you do not define any sections in your template, the entire template is considered to be one logical section (ie. the [ === BODY === ] section) and will be applied to each of your feed items.

What are Template Fields?

Within a template, you use a special place holder to reference the details from your feed. The syntax for this holder is:

[' user ']

The value you use within your place holder should relate to the tag name from your feed.

For example, the last.fm recent track XML has a <name> tag, so if I want to use that name value in my template, I would define the place holder (in my [ === BODY === ] section) as [' name '].

Once I'm set up, what does fubnub'ing a feed really do?

The best way to explain it is to show an example of the process in action, so here are the three basic steps a feed goes through when you 'fubnub' it: