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.