Superfeedr Blog

We’ve been using Slicehost since the beginning of the Superfeedr adventure. We loved their approach, the simplicity of the service and even the quality of the support. At the time, when we compared with EC2, the performance/$ was even better specially since it included some kind of bandwidth bundled with...  

Our XMPP console is great for very initial debugging but doesn’t fulfill a lot of our user’s need after they subscribed to a few dozen feeds. Additionally, the subscribers who use PubSubHubbub cannot benefit from it and they usually have a hard time debugging their endpoints. As a consequence of...  

[Update] we now have a much better way to assess the popularity of each feed inside Superfeedr by combining many different signals, from the social networks, the feed readers… etc. Check our schema for details and see how to use Superfeedr to subscribe to the most popular content on the...  

Our Track API evolved over time… Please make sure you refer to the track documentation for the current status Superfeedr’s hosted hubs come up with a lot of nifty things. We recently introduced a few more : track feeds, fat pings and publisher callbacks. Track feeds for hosted hubs Back...  

If you’ve been blogging for more than a few days, you already found out that the faster your content is propagated, the more engagement you get ; it’s shared, retweeted, commented, liked more in the first minutes after publication than in the next days altogether. The protocol PubSubHubbub helps you...  

It’s now a little over 2 months that we started charging our customers and, like we expected, we learnt a lot. The first thing that we learnt (but we hoped that too) is that we’re building a legit business. Without going much into details, we made enough revenues to cover...  

Today’s best news is coming from Digg HQ : Digg v4. I wasn’t a big Digg user, but their new approach, with news tailored to me based on my social network makes a ton of sense for me. If you’ve been playing with it in the past weeks, you’ve seen...  

We live in the realtime web era. There are different appreciations of what realtime web is. To me, the best definition is that it means the content is pushed from a publisher to a subscriber, rather than have the subscriber poll the publisher over and over. Today there exists a...  

Publish-Subscribe patterns are hard to debug, because they silently fail. When you give us a feed to parse on your behalf, you have to wait for us to actually send you some data to be 100% sure that everything works. In the coming months, we will slowly release more tools...  

At Superfeedr, we do a lot of polling, and we do it in aggressive ways sometimes. We obviously try anything we can to be nice with servers, by implementing ETags, If-Modified-Since headers, but also (and more importantly), by avoiding to make any request that doesn’t need to be made (using...