October 05, 2003

Ralph fleshes out the RSS pub/sub thing

Ralph gives a lot of details to my last post about RSS. I left a lot of those details as exercises for the reader. :) And yes, it's similar to the existing Mimir back-end.

The subscribe side is pretty straightforward. You teach your aggregator (I still use SharpReader for the moment. Aside: I sure wish it was open source, because there are some things I'd like to add.) to speak XMPP, and teach it that for certain blogs, it should do a JEP-0060 subscribe rather than polling an RSS feed. It's an implementation choice whether you get notified of just the publish event, or whether the actuall RSS data is in the notification. If the former, you just pull the RSS feed whenever you get a notification. With the latter, you're done, but you may have to refactor your aggregator a little more.

On the publishing side, there are two approaches that I've thought of.

  1. Make a plugin for your blog tool (like mine, Movable Type) so that whenever you publish a story using existing tools, the server side does a publish to a particular node. The advantage here is that you can still publish stories from an Internet cafe in whatever town you travel to, and you keep all of the complexity where it belongs, on the server. However, with MT, this is a little difficult, since I haven't found a good event to catch when a new story is posted.
  2. The other way is to have a bot that subscribes to a node, and speaks MT API. Whenever a story is published to a the node, the bot publishes to MT also. Aggregators can subscribe to the same node. Downside is that you have to use a publish-capable Jabber client, and that client needs to know enough RSS to publish correct meta-data.

Now, we still need to work out the schema of what gets published. It could be as simple as picking an RSS flavor, and publishing a single item at a time.

Posted by jhildebrand at October 5, 2003 02:24 PM