Educer » my status cloud

On pubsubhubbub (Part 2) – Get with it, PuSH, you’re supposed to be realtime.

jeremy — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:38:17 +0000

Or at least that’s what I thought you were supposed to be. But that’s not what I’m seeing. What I am seeing is the groundwork for a real time network– link rel=”hub” has been added to every Blogger feed and every FeedBurner feed, no? What I am not seeing are the real time feed updates coming from that network.

I setup My Status Cloud as both RSS Cloud and PuSH enabled. But when I post a new Tweet or cloud message, I can only rely consistently on Dave Winer’s RSS Cloud hub to pass my update information on. The “official” pubsubhubbub server is hit and miss. Whether it’s rate limiting or being lazy, in my little decentralized 140 character network, not every status update is pushed to me immediately by PuSH. Some are grouped together after two updates have been sent. That’s not real time.

I’ve subscribed to many feeds that are PuSH enabled through My Status Cloud. Or at least the FeedBurner feed published indicates that they are. When do I get the updates? Often a large amount of time after they are published. Whenever I’ve gotten a notification from an RSS Cloud server, it is usually within seconds, sometimes up to a minute.

You. Are. Random. That’s the perception I have. There are so many feeds that I’m passed PuSH notifications throughout the day for – with old content and no new content. Fat pings, useful? Yes. More fat pings than necessary? Not so much.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t taken the time to read through the complete documentation to see if I can figure out how the server end of things is supposed to work behind the scenes. When I decide to build a server, I will. Maybe I’m missing an explanation for the sporadic-ness that is coming out of there, but it really should be resolved. If we’re going to be real time, let’s be it already.

On RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub (Part 1) – Publishers Have Some Work To Do

jeremy — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:32:01 +0000

The web is live.

Yes, seriously, it is there there already.

I built a public aggregator that supports RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub. Dave Winer has a public aggregator that supports RSS Cloud. Lazyfeed has an aggregator that supports RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub. Google Reader has started to adopt PubSubHubbub. Many more are on the way, if not already here. A few more light switches to flip and all of a sudden you are playing catch up.

Who’s you? Let’s try who isn’t first.

CNN has it. Their news wire feed has been RSS Cloud enabled almost since the moment that Dave Winer announced support for RSS Cloud in WordPress.

Om has it. Another that has been RSS Cloud enabled since the beginning.

Techcrunch has it two ways – RSS Cloud through the main feed and pubsubhubbub through the FeedBurner feed.

Gizmodo supports pubsubhubub through FeedBurner. GDGT supports pubsubhubbub through their native feed.

Who doesn’t?

Engadget has nothing enabled. They’re now the last source of gadget information. NY Times – nothing, LA Times – nothing, AP – nothing, Washington Post – nothing, MSNBC – nothing, Fox News – pretends to, Reuters – pretends to. More detail on the “pretends to” later, anybody else I’m forgetting?

So what do you do as a publisher?

You Read and then implement.

If I can ship an RSS Cloud aggregator in a little over a week from scratch, and add support for pubsubhubbub in a night, all while working a full time job during the day that has nothing to do with either…. you can afford to spend some time figuring out the best way for you to publish content using real time tech.

Which one is better? I don’t make those decisions. Which one should you implement? Whichever one you ship first. Just do it already and get on board.

What shouldn’t you do as a publisher?

I’m not usually one to say this, but don’t put all your faith in Google. Not yet at least. Just because you’re site uses FeedBurner and FeedBurner has decided they support pubsubhubbub, doesn’t mean that your content is actually being pushed in real time. More than likely you’re setup to ping FeedBurner separately. Feedburner then decides when to poll you before turning around and notifying the hub that the content is updated.

Instead, take control of your publishing process. Your web folks should be able to make the basic notifications required for both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub to work. And this should something that is done separate from the FeedBurner process. Don’t count on them to ping on their time. Ping when you publish.

The web is live, RSS and Atom are alive, and content is flowing in real time. I’m harnessing it, and you will be soon. If you are a publisher, you do not want to miss this boat.

My Status Cloud – Now Supporting RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub

jeremy — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:17:51 +0000

The third post written is the first post published. How does that work?

Anyhow.

Number One.

As of last night, My Status Cloud has support for both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub.

Now, while everyone decides which protocol to use, we can just use them. Ship both first, then decide. I like that answer the best.

Actually, they both have benefits and can probably coexist. More notes on what I think will follow. I’ve been closely watching the notifications roll in and I do have some observations to share. Even more so than you will see in the next couple posts.

Number Two.

I stated the other night how I felt about the work I’ve been doing. Pretty proud actually. I don’t normally get that way, but it’s cool. In fact, how many aggregators do you know support both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub? LazyFeed and…. Just saying.

What this really means is that I’ve been head down coding most nights without paying attention much to the usability of the site. I like having something to play with before I decide how to use it. I also avoided any kind of closed alpha/beta time because I think watching the progress can be fun for people. So, usability changes are on the way. Little helpers and hints to make things easy to use will be added.

If you’re using it, let me know. This really is your chance to have a feed reader that has the features you want. We’ll build them. And more feature posts will be coming soon explaining exactly why it is you should be using My Status Cloud.

Is Your OPML Cloud Enabled? Let’s Find Out!

jeremy — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:17:48 +0000

New features on My Status Cloud tonight. Actually, one has been around for a couple days, but I wanted to get the next one in before sharing.

First, my favorite, you can now subscribe by OPML file instead of inputting only a single feed or a .tel domain into the subscription box. How cool is that really? Well, instead of going one by one through your favorite feeds to determine if they’re ready for the next step, you can pass the URL of the entire list of feeds and we’ll do it for you. Pretty sweet.

Do note that if you use this method, the output is going to be a little less friendly. For the sake of showing the user what feeds were or weren’t cloud enabled, I don’t go back to the nice main page after you submit the URL. Instead, I give a list of the URLs that were contained in that OPML file and what the status of each is. The return value will either be:

SUCCESS (cloud enabled feed found)
EXISTS (we’re already aware)
NO CLOUD (feed was found, but it wasn’t cloud enabled)
or NO RSS FEED (something just isn’t right about the feed from first automatic glance)

Be aware that if the OPML file you are providing has MANY feeds on it, and some of those feeds are slow to respond, this may take a while to completely process. I’m not fancy enough to handle background scripting for this type of thing yet.

And for a third OPML note- if you have an OPML file that you’d be willing to share, please let me know and I will check it on a regular basis to see when clouds start appearing.

Also, second feature add, you can now mark items as saved when logged in to My Status Cloud. Just look for the little save link at the top of each item to save or un-save it. Then look for the link to your saved items on the left to view anything that has been saved. The first step towards some kind of favorite/star aggregation. You know?

That’s it. More coming. I think XML-RPC is working on the subscription end, but I’m waiting to see how that pans out before providing more detail and options.

Subscribing To RSS Cloud Feeds Via .TEL Domains

jeremy — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:59:22 +0000

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not so savvy to the world of domains and DNS. I can configure standard CNAME, A, MX stuff as need be, but I don’t go much beyond that. It was intriguing then to get a request from @plaggypig asking if I could resolve feeds from .TEL lookups. One of my favorite things to do is to try stuff I don’t know anything about.

@jeremyfelt Can you resolve feed URLs from .tel names? It’s just a simple DNS lookup: dig +short davewiner.tel NAPTR|cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 4-5

From what I do know of .TEL and the surface stuff I’ve read, this didn’t seem like such a bad idea. And it took only less than an hour to implement, so here goes.

You can now subscribe to rssCloud enabled feeds in My Status Cloud by entering in a TEL Domain. Once you have submitted the domain, I grab the DNS records, get the feed data attached to it, attempt to grab the feeds, verify that they are cloud enabled, and continue accordingly.

If a feed is cloud enabled, it will be subscribed to automatically and show up on the subscriptions list. Possible error messages will return when the feed already exists, has no cloud element, or causes some other unknown error.

I was admittedly hurried in pushing up the code, so the return error handling isn’t the best. Right now the message will show above the subscribe box as “Feed 1 – result”, “Feed 2 – result”. That will get better shortly.

Part 2 of the admittedly hurried part (notice a trend?) is that I am not storing the TEL information at this time. I lookup DNS, parse the results, and play with the feeds. Soon, I will store the TEL URLs that are added and use them as part of the regular subscription process. The huge benefit in this is that you could move your feed around from client to client and not have to work too much at it.

Even More Cloud Enabled Feeds (Your Own)

jeremy — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:08:33 +0000

Dave Winer went full on rock and roll on Friday when he told everybody he was following they now have a cloud enabled feed. I’m not sure if he would use this analogy, but he became somewhat of a FeedBurner to Twitter’s proprietary unchangeable publishing format. A TweetBurner?

There is a two part awesomeness to this. One, a bunch of people have RSS cloud enabled feeds without having to lift a finger. And two, tons of developers instantly have RSS cloud enabled feeds available to them for testing. I fit in both categories.

The only unfortunate thing, which I’m guessing won’t be the case for long, is that you have to be followed by Dave in order to appear in that list.

Fortunately, there’s already an answer for that too if you’re willing to try a little beta software. My Status Cloud is an RSS Cloud aggregator, RSS Cloud client, AND Twitter client. Anything you post to the cloud or Twitter through mystatuscloud.com is immediately available in a cloud enabled feed as well. Mine is here.

And, if you want to publish the feed somewhere else, you can do that to! If you want to know more, see my earlier post on the available features.

Publish, Ping, Subscribe Away With My Status Cloud (You Can Change Settings Now)

jeremy — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:33:26 +0000

Lots of new stuff has been added to My Status Cloud since the last time I chatted. I’ve been in a holding pattern the last couple days while I’ve waited for my thoughts to collect on a few other things, but I haven’t had time to do any actual producing yet, so I’ll push this out for now.

First, the look and feel has changed quite a bit. I always do funny things with colors and rounded corners when I first start, but then get sick of them and go back to shades of grey very quickly – so there you go. Easier to read.

Next, which is more like 4 in 1, you have configurable options!

User Settings: You are now able to change or remove your email address and manage your OAuth connection to Twitter through preferences.
Ping Settings: If you’ve started to develop your own rss Cloud server and want to try a different client, these settings can be changed to work with your server. Only http-post is supported at the moment, but I’ll be working on a SOAP and XML-RPC version soon.
Subscription Settings: Another option for those who have started to implement their own rss Cloud server. These settings allow you to play with the actual cloud element in your My Status Cloud RSS feed. Also with this- only http-post is supported for the time being.
Publishing Settings: This is the best part, I think, brought on by what I was thinking in last friday’s post… You can now enter FTP settings to publish your My Status Cloud RSS feed to your own server. If an FTP server exists, the application will attempt to upload your feed (username.xml) to the server specified.

Ponder those changes for a second if you didn’t grab it the first time and I’ll add all the previous pieces together for the overview.

The overview…

You can cross post updates into the rssCloud and/or Twitter at the same time.
Links can be attached as metadata to the update so you can use ALL 140 characters.
These updates, Twitter or not, are saved into an rssCloud compatible feed.
An rssCloud server, rpc.rsscloud.org, is notified every time you update either the cloud or Twitter.
The My Status Cloud client/aggregator shows you the updates immediately after being notified by the server that it has been updated.
You can publish (or backup) your feed anywhere via FTP.
You can start to manage your feed through an rssCloud server other than rpc.rsscloud.org.

There you have it. Try away and report away if you see anything unexpected.