Superfeedr Blog

Consuming RSS feeds in a web application is often complex and requires offline workers or queue systems which are yet another infrastructure to maintain. This scheduling algorithm also means that this application will be “late” at detecting updates or will check the feeds too frequently for most publishers. A Rails...  

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” History repeats itself. Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was unilaterally shutting down its firehose partners. It’s not very different from what Twitter did a couple years ago when they started limiting the 3rd party client’s API accesses. APIs as...  

We’re incredibly excited to introduce a new type of user on Superfeedr today: trackers. As you probably know, publishers are applications, like Medium or Etsy, which decided to host their PubSubHubbub hub with Superfeedr. Subscribers, on the other end, are applications which consume our feed API to agregate feeds from...  

Branding is the most important aspect of any tech company. After our redesign last year, we decided to sit with an internationaly recognized consulting firm and assess our brand and the messages it conveys. After working very hard for weeks and weeks and we came up with a new name...  

We’re often asked to show case simple applications built using Superfeedr. People also ask us how easy it would be to build a feed reader using Superfeedr. Of course, there are thounsands of ways to build feed reader, but we thought we’d share one very simple example for such an...  

You’re probably familiar with our retrieve by feed API which lets you retrieve past content from a feed quite conveniently: curl -D- -G https://push.superfeedr.com/ \ -d'hub.mode=retrieve' \ -d'hub.topic=http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed' \ -d'format=json' \ -u'demo:27628f5c4ef62fad902dce4be789d1d7' One of the great features of this API is the ability to stream upcoming new entries from a...  

A webhook is a very common design pattern for HTTP APIs. Webhooks provide an elegant mechanism for developers who are interested in changes happening “rarely” on an HTTP resource (or API). They are sometimes called callback URL. In the context of PubSubHubbub (and Superfeedr, by extension), A 3rd party developer...  

At Superfeedr, we’re selfdogfooding. When we started looking at the User-Agents of services polling our feeds, we found numerous interesting things. One of them is that several feed reader do include a feed-id in the User-Agent strings. This is quite convenient for debugging purposes and we also believe it should...  

PubSubHubbub is a free, open and decentralized protocol. It relies on webhooks to push feed updates in real-time from publishers to subscribers (feed readers). Most importantly, PubSubHubbub builds on existing infrastructure: implementing it won’t change or break your current polling infrastructure, and if for some reason something fails, you can...  

A couple weeks ago, we moved this static blog from github pages to Amazon S3. The move itself was uneventful, as both plaforms handle CNAME’s pretty well. However, S3 provides a feature that we needed: redirects. We wanted to redirect our feed address to an app which we could use...