Facebook API - Get comments

We have a Facebook fan page in our business. The fan page doesn't seem to generate any emails when updates are made to the page, whether someone adds a new status or someone comments on one of the statuses, etc.

We are currently running a very crude script to grab the content of the page and then use regular expressions to get the information we want. Obviously this is not foolish proof and I am considering alternatives to this method.

I am looking at the facebook API and wondering if another server might be an option. However, I cannot figure out how to return information about fan page statuses and their comments. Can anyone please guide me on how to use the API to get this information. I am the fan page administrator. The programming language I am using is PHP.

Many thanks.