Superfeedr Blog

Let’s face it : RSS feeds, like any other useful technology on the web, suffer from spam. If your app let’s user input feed urls, it’s likely that a few of them have entered spam feeds. It’s even more true if your app is used to re-publish, re-share or re-post...  

Last month, we introduced arbitrary content PubSubHubbub subscription, which allowed you to subscribe to any kind of web resource, including HTML web pages (but also JSON, YAML, VCard and many many more). HTML is a rich format, which means that an HTML page contains a lot of data and that...  

2010 has been a wonderful year for Superfeedr. The idea of a realtime web made tremendous progress even though I think people are still not fully realizing the benefit of having a smart web of interconnected islands, rather than having an archipelago where each website interacts with others in a...  

We’re probably late to that game, but one of our goals for December was to switch to Ruby 1.9. We use a lot of Ruby at Superfeedr. Some people claim (and some of them are right) that Ruby has a poor performance compared to other languages in the same category....  

I’ve read several times that it’s dumb to do the same thing more than twice. If that happens, it means that you can automate it and never do it any more. Today we’re announcing arbitrary content support, which means that you’ll be able to subscribe to any kind of content...  

Up until now, Superfeedr mostly focused on server to server communications (even though, technically, XMPP also works very well with clients too). Today, we’re announcing 2 server to client protocols, even though, they too, can be used for servers : websockets and comet. On both, we will push JSON by...  

Today, GNIP and Twitter announced a deal where GNIP will be able to resell some of the Twitter data. Twitter repeated several times that they didn’t want to use PubSubHubbub and prefered closed and proprietary solutions. I believe that, from the beginning, we were not clear enough that PubSubHubbub was...  

At Superfeedr, our biggest focus is to make RSS/Atom feeds consumption much easier than what it was, just a year ago. Of course, the “transportation” part of it is a big issue. Polling was the only way up to a few months ago. It’s now less and less the case...  

Last spring, we had our first attempt at releasing a feature that a lot of you asked for : cave. The cave is where Superfeedr stores all the entries that we find in all the feeds that we process. It’s not quite easy with the volume that we’re dealing with,...  

For a lot of people, PubSubHubbub is something that should mostly work with the social web. However, when you think about it, it is actually much wider, as it relies solely on feeds, without caring much about the semantics of this feed. Today, I’d like to introduce you to BlameStella....