This evening I had that not uncommon need to track down some dusty old Facebook comments from a couple of years ago. Naturally, Facebook makes it difficult to see anything more than a week old, but if you keep clicking “Older Posts” at the bottom of your (or a friend’s) Wall for long enough, you can see all posts back to the beginning of time.

This is kind of nice, but very tedious. Surely there’s a way to automate this process? I’ve seen numerous attempts, but many are either too complex for such a simple task (such as the sprawling Social Fixer browser extension), or too simple for the ever-changing complexities of Facebook. I decided to take a couple of pointers and put my new-found jQuery skills to a quick test. The result: FBExpand, a simple tool for a simple purpose.

The code is up on Bitbucket for inspection, but to put it to work right away it’s much easier to use this bookmarklet: FBExpand. Drag that link to your bookmarks bar, and simply click it when you want to expand some Facebook history (e.g. when viewing your Wall). Too easy!

After the break, I’ll have a go at walking through the code.
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