Skip to content
Karl Dahlke edited this page Dec 15, 2022 · 8 revisions

Accessing facebook.com

Like most social media sites, facebook is very graphical, and very difficult to use from edbrowse, or with any screen reader. However, facebook has a mobile friendly website, m.facebook.com. This is perfect! You don't even need javascript - so turn it off with nojs = facebook.com. You can create an account (no captcha), then enjoy most of facebook's features. First, a cleanup function that removes most of the commercials. I look for a commercial header, then enter a loop deleting that type of commercial, as long as I can. There can be two of the same kind of commercial on a page. The dot is there just in case you want to see what is being deleted along the way. The Suggested Pages is a bit dodgy, since there is no clear end marker for the commercial. I just assume there are three suggested pages, and stop at the third instance of {Like}. You can always refresh the page if you want to see how it was.

I start at the first h3, the first article. Type / to move to the next article, and so on. You may want to search without wrap, sw-, so the end of the page is the end, then <fbn takes you to the next page.

function:fbclean {
    #  clean facebook page

ci+ # The worst is zuckerberg's crap! /h3 Connect With Facebook/X if() { ka /h3 Facebook Engineering/X if(?) { /h3 Instagram/X } if() { kb 'ap 'bX 'a,/^h3/-d } } /h3 People You May Know/X if() { p .,/^{See More}$/d } /Suggested Post/X while() { p .,/Frame {xti}/d if() { /Suggested Post/X } else { /x@x@x@/X } } /Suggested Group/X while() { p .,/{See More}/d if() { /Suggested Group/X } else { /x@x@x@/X } } /} likes {[\w '&]+}.$/X while() { p .,/Frame {xti}/d if() { /} likes {[\w '&]+}.$/X } else { /x@x@x@/X } } /} likes this.$/X while() { p .,/Frame {ai}/d if() { /} likes* this.$/X } else { /x@x@x@/X } } /^h3 Suggested Pages$/X if() { ks sw- /^{Like}$/X if() { /^{Like}$/X /^{Like}$/X 's,.d } sw+ } g/{No automatic alt text available}/d #g/{Image may contain:.*}/d g/^{\d+}$/d g/^({photo} *)+$/d 1X /^h3/ }

The cleanup function is called by fbs (facebook start), and fbn (facebook next). It is a convoluted function that is tailored to the details of the facebook website, which change all the time. Thus you want to modify this function as facebook evolves. I don't guarantee to keep this up to date; it is just an outline. Just sayin, with scripting you can skate past almost all of the commercials.

function:fbs {
    #  first facebook page
    b m.facebook.com
    3
    &lt;fbclean
}

function:fbn {
    #  next facebook page
    /See More \(Posts\|Stories\)}/g
    &lt;fbclean
}

fbs assumes your cookies will log you in and take you straight to your home page. If not, the clean function probably won't do any harm, and will just start printing the login page. Log in, and then the cookies should make it all work next time around.

Go to m.facebook.com as edbrowse and you get text fields to comment, basically one long line of text. Use agentsite to go in as Internet Explorer 7 and you get real text buffers to comment.

agent = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)

agentsite = facebook.com 1

You need to do the same thing, agentsite = google.com 1, if you want h3 headers on google's search results. It's a jungle out there.

If you follow a link from facebook, the url typically has search data after it, like ?campaign=facebook&foo=bar&blah=3837927377377. You can safely lop this off, especially if you are saving it as a bookmark. Run this function after the A command.

function :booklop {
#  lop off ?search and append to bookmark file
1s/\?.*/'>/
w+ $webbook
}