Often times people email me to ask if Superfeedr can be used to get IM alerts when a feed they follow as been updated. I usually tell them that, even though we are able to send traffic via XMPP, it’s unlikely that their client can “understand” that traffic, because it’s probably only a chat client, and not a PubSub client. In a nutshell, Superfeedr is a service on which RSS to IM bots can easily be built.
That’s exactly how Notifixlite was built : a very simple bot which will send you messages whenever a feed that you follow has been updated. If you have a chat client that supports XMPP (see a full list of clients here), and if you have a Google Mail account, you can very easily get started. First, connect using your gmail credentials, and then, add notifixlite@appspot.com as a contact.
Then, you’re set. Notifixlite is a bot to which you can give instructions. Right now the set of instructions is quite minimal :
/subscribe _url_: subscribes to the feed in question./unsubscribe _url_: unsubscribes from the feed. You can also use all to unsubscribe from all feeds./list _page_index_: list subscriptions, default to page 1./help: shows this help message!
Of course, you can track any feed out there… including track feeds ! Superfeedr provides a nice way to filter traffic based on keywords and you can easily subscribe to http://superfeedr.com/track?include=valentine if you want to see any mention of Valentine!
Also, one of the great things with Notifixlite is that it’s open source : you can not only fork it on github, but also run it under your very own Google App Engine account. If you’re feeling brave, feel free to implement any feature that you miss! An import from Google Reader would be quite handsome for example!
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