This article was published on October 31, 2009

Get Realtime RSS Updates in GTalk with PuSH Bot.


Get Realtime RSS Updates in GTalk with PuSH Bot.

push-botThis is very cool.

In case you missed it PubSubHubbub is a way for you to receive near-instant notifications of change updates to a PubSubHubbub enabled RSS/Atom feed. So, the moment a new post appears on a blog for example, you’ll receive instant notifications in PubSubHubHub supported applications (eg. lazyfeed.com).

When XMPP support in Google App Engine was announced, Coder Mihai Parparita, took it upon himself to create PubSubHubbub-to-XMPP bridge making it possible to receive real time updates of PubSubHubbub enabled feeds via XMPP (eg. GTalk).

After a few stumbling blocks, Parparita managed to cook up a pretty nifty application that will essentially let you receive an update in GTalk the moment a PubSubHubbub enabled feed has been updated.

It’s not too basic either, no need to find the RSS feeds for each URL, PuSH bot will do that for you. OPML import for bulk subscribing is also enabled so no need to add each URL one at a time.

If you’re a big IM user, PuSH Bot might just slot in neatly into your work flow.

Basic instructions you can find below, but visit the app’s homepage for full instructions.

Subscribing

  1. Add [email protected] to your contact list.
  2. Send it a subscription message by using the /subscribe command: /subscribe http://example.com/feed.xml
  3. If all goes well, you should see a confirmation message like Subscribed to http://example.com/feed.xml
  4. Whenever that feed updates, you’ll get a notification of the form:
    Update from Some Feed:
    Post Title Goes Here: http://www.example.com/post.html

Note that you do not have to specify a feed URL, if you instead use a webpage URL, PuSH Bot will attempt to look for an auto-discovery element in it, and if it finds a feed, subscribe to that instead.

To see all of the feeds you’re subscribed to, send the bot the /list-subscriptions command.

Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe from a feed, send the bot the /unsubscribe command: /unsubscribe http://example.com/feed.xml. If you’d like to unsubscribe from all feeds, you can use the /unsubscribe-all command.

Advanced Usage

To see a list of all commands that PuSH Bot supports, you can use the /help command.

OPML Import

If you’d like to subscribe to many feeds at once, you may find it convenient to generate an OPML file from your existing feed reader and import that. Assuming your OPML file is reacheable at a URL, you can use the /opml-import command: /opml-import http://example.com/opml.xml. PuSH Bot will parse the OPML file and extract all feeds URLs from it, and will attempt to subscribe to each one. Note that large OPML files may not be imported completely since the request may time out before all subscribe requests are issued.

Thanks @SSethi

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Published
Back to top