Pubsubhubbub

I have to admit the first time I heard about pubsubhubbub I was pretty skeptical. I mean your telling me that every rss feed is going to need to change and be more active, PIPE DREAM… Of course I failed myself by just reading the “hub bub” and not taking the time to read the actual protocol.

My only real issue was about feeds having to be active and pinging hubs. After reading a discussion that hubs could be designed to do a manual fetch of the feed and that it wouldn’t be against protocol. You couldn’t take advantage of the real-time aspects but your not shut out.

So I spent some time looking over the spec but I never learn anything without playing around. So on the last day of my vacation I managed to eek out some time and start playing. First thing was to build an end point and have it email me the request as I manually subscribed to the hub at http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com. Next day I got the end point to respond with the right challenge phrase, and now subscriber pings were flowing.

I sat on that for a bit trying to get a feel for the pings and subscribed to a few more feeds. I think it was at this time I realized the greatest thing about pubsubhubbub, I didn’t have to build a feed engine, just a catchers mitt. Sure for what I had in mind I’d have to slice up the <item> pretty deep, but I don’t have to manage a threading model to efficiently consume feeds. Yippeeee! Awesome.

So now I have an end point that does about 75% of the <item> parsing that I want to do and 7 feeds with two of them being google shared feeds.

You can take a look at a quick little reader I built at http://http://punchingsoup.com/#pubsubhubbub_panel. It’s ugly and doesn’t work quite right but it’s good enough to show.