How to capture a set of posts and comments from Face Book?

October 17, 2012 9:44 AM

A friend would like me to save her some posts and comments from FB in a less ephemeral way. I'd like to copy them and make them into some sort of book or pamphlet for her. Have you done this sort of thing before and if so, how? I've seen Fonicle, which I think is a bit of overkill for this situation.

The details are that my friend is in the process of giving birth to her stillborn daughter. She made a brief announcement about it on FB and has received 150 or more comments. Her mother has suggested to me that she would like to be able to read these condolences off-line, as it were.

I could just cut and paste to Word and be done, but I was hoping for something just a step up from that.

Also, of course she has posted some sweet pictures of herself and her husband showing the pregnancy. Would it be weird to include some of those? I think not, but I've never been through this situation myself.

Thanks for your help, you guys. This is giving me something to do for her while my heart is breaking.

posted by jvilter to Technology (6 answers total)

You can download a copy of your entire profile, comments and all, using the Facebook interface. That would seem to be a good place to start. Once you've got those files, you can convert them to images--using screen shots if nothing else--and go from there.
posted by valkyryn at 9:55 AM on October 17, 2012

Your friend will need to download her Facebook content - there is a link somewhere in Facebook to do it. Then you'll need to parse the data to get what you want out - cut and paste, write a script, however you can handle it. The file you get from FB is not pretty, it's basically a data dump. You can specify a date range, so that should help.
posted by COD at 10:02 AM on October 17, 2012

Response by poster: Let's assume that I don't want to bug her to be downloading anything. That I have to do this by myself. I've cut and pasted into Word, and it's not pretty, but I can edit.
posted by jvilter at 10:05 AM on October 17, 2012

Seems like the best/nicest-looking way to do it would be to just take screen shots and paste into Word (if it were me I'd spruce it up and put a pretty border or something). If you don't already have the software there are a ton of free ones out there.
posted by lovableiago at 10:15 AM on October 17, 2012

In Firefox, you can go to File and then "Save Page As" and save the whole web page. This should yield a file that can then be opened in any browser and display exactly as that page would appear on the 'net, but it's actually on your computer.
posted by needs more cowbell at 11:03 AM on October 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Get a free trial of Snagit; you can screen-cap a scrolling screen for editing.
posted by Pomo at 6:21 PM on October 17, 2012