Superfeedr Blog : Real-time cloudy thoughts from a super-hero

XMPP-FTW XMPP and JSON for the Web

2013-05-13T00:00:00-07:00

XMPP always had a special place in our heart. It’s an amazing protocol which comes with presence, addressing, as well as PubSub baked in. It’s no surprise we’ve had an XMPP API since day 1 at Superfeedr.

Now, though, XMPP scares a lot of people because of it’s X part: it uses XML as its data schema. Knowing that, Lloyd, an extremely talented web developer invented a very elegant solution for people to discover XMPP without dealing with the XML at all, thru XMPP for the Web (XMPP-FTW).

XMPP-FTW

XMPP-FTW is actually a proxy XMPP client which converts all the XML into a json API. It sits between the XMPP server and any app which can consume JSON. It supports the code XMPP protocol as well as a bunch of other features, including Superfeedr.

The demo is quite helpful to understand exactly what is going on. You can perform calls and configure them. In the back, they’ll be converted by XMPP-FTW to regular XMPP stanzas. Similarly, incoming XMPP messages will be converted into javsacript events which your app can handle.

Superfeedr support

Recently, Lloyd added support for the Superfeedr API and it’s a great playground to get started. Here is a little HOW-TO that you can try in the demo app. (you could also run your own XMPP-FTW)

Type xmpp.login, in the ‘event name’ box.
Options should appear in the following grey box. Replace them with {"jid": "demo@superfeedr.com","password": "demo"}. Hit ‘send’.
Quickly, you should see an incoming event indicating that you’re now connected to Superfeedr XMPP server!
Type xmpp.superfeedr.subscribe
Complete the option box with { "feed": "http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed"}
You should see a response indicating that you’re now subscribed to that feed. The response also includes its status, the last time we parsed the feed… etc
In another browser tab, publish something new in that feed using this app.
You should see the incoming notification in XMPP-FTW!

That’s that simple and you should quickly replace the example feed url with any feed url that you may be interested in susbcribing to.

Also, once you’ve played with XMPP-FTW a bit more, we stringly encourage you to look at XMPP in more details. It’s a very elegant protocol and federates by default (as opposed to many APIs out there).

SubToMe Store

2013-04-28T00:00:00-07:00

As the web now flourishes with new feed readers, we have decided to help that community by simplifying the subscription process as it is still extremely complex for a user to say “I want to know when there is new content here”.

Today, we’re excited to launch the SubToMe Store. It’s a list of web or mobile applications that users can use to subscribe to feeds on websites.

Of course, adding your app to the store is one pull request away, so please, if you’re working on an RSS consuming app, make sure you add yours, as well as don’t forget to add discovery for your users, so that they won’t even have to add your apps!

Why SubToMe is better

2013-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

A couple weeks ago (before the Google Reader demise!), we soft launched SubToMe as a universal subscribe button. As weeks passed, we tried to promote it. We offered a SubToMe Wordpress plugin, a Chrome Extension, a Firefox Extension… etc.

Yet, several people came to us and said: Why is it better than a Google Reader button? (replace Google Reader by Newsblur, BlogLovin, or Feedly). The answer is that it’s agnostic. It’s a button that works for any of these services. But even more than agnostic, it’s a button that works for the subscriber.

It’s better for publishers

Publishers want people to follow them and subscribe to their content. Yet, they cannot realistically put buttons for each and every reader out there, not only because it would be ugly, but also because it means that when a new reader comes out, they will have to think about adding a new button.

By being agnostic, SubToMe can be the single button publishers put on their site, but still allow all of their readers to follow them on their favorite reader.

It’s better for subscribers

SubToMe includes a transparent registration mechanism so that once you use a subscribing application, SubToMe remembers it and will only show the services you used, rather than an infinite list of tools.

For example, if you are a Kippt user, you can use Feedleap to save your favorite feeds content there. Feedleap implemented the registration mechanism. Once you’ve set up a Feedleap account, click on . You will now see that Feeleap is an option there :)

Several other readers, like The Old Reader or Msgboy implement that registration mechanism. This makes following sites easier.

A Google Reader Compatible API

2013-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

As we’re been providing APIs to build feed readers for years now, last week, we saw a flock of people coming to us and asking if we could help them overcome the disparition of the Google Reader API.

Replacing the Google Reader API

Superfeedr will provide a partial replacement for the Google Reader API by the end of June. We have already started on it an we’re confident we can release something quickly. As you may know, the Google Reader API actually consists of two different things:

The entry and feed data.
The sync’ing of user state: read/unread, starred, tags, shared items… etc

At this point, we know that we will provide a compatible API for the feed and entry data, but, more importantly, we will try to backup as much of that data out of Google Reader for the feeds that our customers have subscribed to.

In other words, our goal is to support all the /reader/atom/ prefixed calls, and the params for it, along with the historical data served by Google Reader that we will have been able to ‘rescue’.

Syncing the state

Sync’ing state has never been our core business, and as we’ve built a backend system, we are not completely sure we will be able to provide the sync layer that many developers would love to see. It will take us a couple more weeks to figure whether we can (or not) provide a replacement for that part of the Google Reader API.

However, we believe this is a less critical aspect, as people tend to stick with the same reader, which means that the sync data can be local to a given reader. After all, even Twitter is not able to sync the direct messages you get on different platforms.

Introducing a free Superfeedr plan!

2013-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

In the various list of Google Reader alternatives, we found out that a lot of indie hackers were either hosting their own reader or even creating one.

These people usually decided to build their own pollers because they could not afford to use Superfeedr for such a low volume of data. That made us sad, so we’re changing it.

If your application gets less than 10,000 notifications from us per month, it’s free (as in beer). This means that you can start using Superfeedr and never have to pay for the notifications you get as long as you receive less than 10,000 notifications monthly.

For those who worry that free is exactly one of the reasons that Google Reader close, we tell that we have plenty of amazing customers who get a lot more notifications and who think our service is worth paying for :)

We have more to come this week for all the people looking for a replacement to the Google Reader API: stay tuned, click the subscribe button below!

Publishers, make or break RSS

2013-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

The truth is that eventually, the ones deciding of the RSS fate are not going to be subscribers, but publishers. Publishers, big (media outlets, blogging platforms) or small (indie bloggers or CMS users) can easily decide whether they want RSS to die or to thrive.

Break RSS

If you’re one of these influential tech blog who makes their butter with bold statements and who claimed that RSS is dead, that RSS is a technology of the past, or something that never did anything useful to you, why don’t you just put your money where your mouth is: remove your RSS feeds, delete your feedburner account.

Of course, don’t do that blindly. Do that on the course of a couple months and make sure you monitor everything. Will your frequentation drop? Will people share your content less? Will your SEO start to degrade as well? I’d say yes, yes and yes, but please, prove me wrong.

At this point, Buzzfeed showed Google Reader alone brings more traffic that Google+, Google Reader alone still has a massive userbase, and Matt Cutts told us that PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds are used to identify unique content.

Make RSS

On the other hand, if you think that distributing your content on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ (ha!) is necessary but not enough, if you think that having a truly open and decentralized way of letting other services (and eventually their users) know about the new content you publish is the way to go, then, help us make RSS feeds better and easier to use for everyone.

Making feeds better starts by putting yourself in the shoes of your readers. Let’s say I just stumbled upon an article on your site that I liked; and let’s say that I want more. How, as a site owner do you make it convenient for me to do so? What do you think should be the steps for me to get there? Are these steps easy and simple enough?

We strongly believe that it starts with a button. A simple button that says , and which, when pressed will show your readers a list of options. We have designed such a button and called it SubToMe. If you think it makes things better, you should put it on your site. If you don’t, please tell us why.

Moving RSS forward

2013-03-15T00:00:00-07:00

The death for Google Reader will surely bring a gigantic wave of innovation in the RSS Reader ‘market’. We’ve shown yesterday that there are many many alternatives. Superfeedr is in the business of making RSS easier, we’re introducing a little, simple (baby step thing which we hope will make a subscribing easier to use for everyone.

Subscribing is hard

We’ve heard a lot of people say that they replaced their RSS reader with Twitter, or Facebook. It’s also possible that Google killed Reader to promote G+. These platforms are popular for news reading because it’s so easy to subscribe or follow news sources, or people sharing the blogs… etc. It’s just a click of a button.

Subscribing to an RSS feed is still very hard. When I am on a site I like, I have to find the RSS link (which is often hidden), copy its url, open a new tab and paste the url in he right field. Finally, I can click on the ‘subscribe’ button.

UPDATE; people on HackerNews said that subscribing to an RSS feed is easy. Check this video of how people react when they’re asked what a browser is.

Meet SubToMe

SubToMe aims at simplifying that. It’s a button, click on it:

If all goes well, you should see something like this:

Of course, that’s kind of dumb you may think. This is just a list of readers and it’ll be hard to list them all. Luckily, this button has a registration mechanism. For example, click on use Feedly or Use Bloglovin, and eventually, click again on the button above.

You should now see only the services for which you have been registered. Of course, this should be 100% transparent to the user, using iframes, like The Old Reader already does! This way, each user will be able to use their favorite reader and publishers don’t have to put dozens of follow me on xxx buttons on their sites.

Of course, you may wonder how this is done. Here is a little secret: it’s all stored in localStorage. All the SubToMe files are just static HTML files. No server involved, no app running and no data is ever leaked.

We also have a bookmarklet and browser extensions for you to subscribe easily.

Do you have a blog?

If you do, you probably understand the need for you to control the distribution of your content. You just can’t rely on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ to send your content to your subscribers and followers.

Make sure you pick a platform that has RSS feeds and make sure you allow people to subscribe to your content in the easiest possible way. Follow these instructions if you want to add a SubToMe button.

We have a SubToMe Wordpress extension. Install it!

State of RSS Readers

2013-03-14T00:00:00-07:00

So Google Reader is shutting down. This is obviously worrisome, mostly because the deprecation schedule is tight. But this is also a great news because Google Reader stopped innovating 5 years ago and yet was still the most visible RSS reader out there.

When people said RSS was dead, a lot of them were just expressing the fact that Google Reader was a zombie.

Believe it or not, we had this post in the pipes for a couple weeks. The initial reason for it was to get an exhaustive overview of the many readers out there to convince them they should use SubToMe, but this deserves another post.

There are actually a ton of readers and I’ll focus on the web ones, because the web is my thing.

UPDATE There is indeed a LOT of readers and I’ve been contacted by many people to add theres. Please, make sure you read the comments too as they include a bunch of other suggestions

Msgboy

First, I’d like to point Google Chrome users toward Msgboy which is our own in-house attempt. It’s obviously plugged to Superfeedr (realtime FTW), and will only store your data in your browser.

It’s also completely open source and you can import your data from Google Reader :)

We hope to have a Firefox version very soon. Feel free to get in touch if you think you can help :)

Google Reader and the Google Reader based services

By all counts Google reader is/was the most popular RSS Reader out there. What’s even more interesting is that many other services, like Feedly relied on its API. It’s worth mentionning Reeder too. These services will have to find an alternative to Reader’s API, Superfeedr can help =)

The alternatives

In the past couple weeks, we have seen dozens of new initiatives in this area. Let’s do a quick summary.

Bloglovin

Bloglovin is probably the only popular reader outside of the tech crowd. It’s UI is probably closer to the Tumblr dashboard and the popular tabs tells more about its userbase than anything else: fashion, scrapping, food….

In other words, it’s the proof that you do not need to be a tech nerd to use and enjoy a feed reader.

NewsBlur

NewsBlur is on the other side of the spectrum in terms of users: it’s a very advanced web reader which has been here for a couple years. We love the insight it gives in stories.

Its business model is clear (freemium), which makes it a viable alternative in the long run.

The Old Reader

The old Reader is a very recent readers. Its UI will sound familiar to anyone who’s been using Google Reader because, well it’s explicitly inspired from it. Yet, it does a very good job and this is one of my favorite attempts.

Feedspot

Feedspot is another Google Reader looking alternative.

Netvibes

Netvibes was the most popular reader a couple years back. Even though it moved away from beeing a pure feed reader a long time ago, it still offers these features and may be worth a look if you like its UI.

There are more, like Feedbooster that I’ve been either unable to use or which seem quite abandonned. I’d love to add to that list if you leave a link in the comments :)

Plaform Owned

Wordpress’s Reader

Wordpress.com has a beautiful Reader, which works really well, and it’s federated, which means that you can subscribe to feeds from other sources/platforms, like say Tumblr. I wish though that it offered permanent URLs, so it could be used with SubToMe.

Looks like very few people around me know about that reader though.

I wish other platforms (I’m looking at you Tumblr) which already offer some kind of reader, offered it in a federated way. Why can’t I follow non-tumblr sites in my Tumblr?

Self Hosted

Feedafever

Feedafever is a beautiful self hosted platform. It sold with a $30 fee and then you can run it on your own server.

Netflix’s RSS reader

Netflix’s RSS reader was released earlier this week by Netflix. I’m not sure whether this is a true product or just aimed at being a demo, but it may be worth a try!

Cartulary

Cartulary is web reader developed by Dave Jones to be hosted on Amazon EC2.

Consuming RSS in other ways

Who said you need a dedicated app to consume RSS feeds?

IFTTT

IFTTT is my favorite web automation tool. It has a lot or RSS recipes which can ease your RSS consumption a lot! For example, this recipe will push the content of an RSS feed to you pocket account.

Blogtrottr

Blogtrottr is an RSS to Email service. It allows you to subscribe to feeds and get email when they update. Simple, convenient for those who don’t susbcribe to more than a couple feeds and don’t want to use yet another service.

Notifixlite

Notifixlite is a simple RSS to IM service that we created. Just subscribe to feeds from your chat client nad receive notifications when they update.

Will Google be back?

One of Google’s argument being the end of Reader is the need for them to focus on less services. Google+ is probably one of the few things that Google wants to keep. When you think about it, Google+, like Facebook and Twitter are some kind of reader. You ~~subscribe~~ follow people or even brands, and then get to publish to your stream.

Now, I asked some Googlers why they would not allow (with the right UI, of course) people to follow RSS feeds in their Google+. The response was that Google already had an RSS reader: Google Reader. Well, not anymore. Maybe one day, RSS will come back to Google via Google+ ?

Another theory is that Google is trying to make RSS irrelevant in order to ‘push’ publishers toward Google+ as their main subscription channel.

UPDATE The readers below were added based on comments here and on social networks.

Rolio

Rolio is a simple web based RSS reader. It works great, and self updates when new stories are available.

Skimr

Skimr is probably becoming my new favorite web based readers: a very simple UI, extremely readable on mobile devices.

Tiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS is a reader that you need to install on your own server…

RSSMiner

RSSMiner is a web based reader whose UI is very similar to Google Reader’s. It’s also quite fast. You can upvote and downvote each entry. Code is on Github.

BazQux

BazQux offers a UI very similar to Google. Reader’s. You’ll have to pay to keep using it after some time.

Gregarius

Gregarius. Another feed reader that you’ll need to install (PHP) on your own server.

Want to see ways we could make RSS simpler to use? Click the button below and see how we could ease subscriptions.

Static files hosting with SSL on custom domain

2013-03-08T00:00:00-08:00

SubToMe is a universal subscribe button. One of its key design goals was to use only static files. There should be no server involved: it’s not an app, it’s a button.

Another key aspects of the SubToMe button is that it’s included on many page, and needs to be able to run on any page (thanks to the bookmarklet), including https pages. With that in mind, we are forced to host the button on a system that supports SSL.

The third (and final) constraint is that we must be using the subtome.com domain for it, because it stores the user’s default in his browser’s localstorage. As we know browsers have different localStorage instances for each domain. If we used different domains, then, we’ll found ourselves with different versions of the users default.

We needed a platform to host static files, with our domain and SSL.

When thinking about static files in a very scalable and fully managed way, the almost immediate answer is AWS S3. That’s what we initially tried… create a www.subtome.com bucket, create the right CNAME, upload and hope for profit. The problem is that this does not match the SSL requirement. Amazon offers SSL, but only on their *.aws.amazon.com domain.

In despair, we started considering running a small box somewhere, put Nginx on top, get an SSL cert and run it like in the old days: hoping that I’ll always find the courage to do the basic ops this box will eventually need.

At that point, my first savior comes in the picture. Paddy Foran tweets:

@julien51 developers.google.com/appengine/docs… ?
— Paddy Foran (@paddyforan) March 7, 2013

After reading that doc, I felt that this could be a solution, but was still a bit worried about Google App Engine’s heavy bills. Of course, if that worked, it meant I wouldn’t have to maintain any box after all, but that could cost me more than a full time engineer to maintain these boxes =)

And that’s where my 2nd hero of the day comes to the party. In one of his posts, Harper Reed wrote this:

I am constantly telling my friends about the new technology tricks that I learn in my internet travels. I learn a lot, which has caused my friends to ignore around 90% of what I say about technology. I don’t mind, because I know that I am a genius(heh) and they will come around some day.

Well, in this exact same post, Harper gives out a little secret that I ignored for too long: hosting static files on GAE is free, free as in beer.

The GAE pricing machine is triggered only when instances are running. For static files, Google uses some kind of cache which means that there is no CPU involved in running them…

Hosting any static site on GAE is easy.

Here is what it took to run SubToMe for free on Google App Engine: a small app.yaml file. That’s it.

Configuring SSL was a bit trickier, but I followed the docs, got a free cert from startssl; configured it and added Javascript redirects to all the SubToMe files.

All in all, we get static files hosting, under our own domain, with SSL, unlimited free traffic (and bandwidth) for $9/month, which is what GAE charges for 5 SSL SNI Certificates. I’d say it’s a good deal which becomes even better when I remember that it’s fully managed!

Sources in Track

2013-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

When we introduced our latest revision of track last week, we announced that we would grant free access to anyone willing to hack on track, as long as they would help us make it better.

Well, that’s exactly what happened! One or our fellow users, who’s working on some great little project asked whether there was any good way to identify the feed of the entry that matched his requests.

Luckily, that was easy for us, mostly because Atom already defines a <source> element to include that. Here is an example:

We include by default the feed’s id, title, updated date, author, information, categories and links … You could then use the link to subscribe to feeds that tend to match a certain keyword.

We have also obviously added that to the JSON mapping of our schema too.

Keep the feedback and feature requests coming, we’re here to help make the web better! Also, again, get in touch if you’d like to access our track feature for free.