When we’ve been selected to be part of LeWeb’s competition this year, we thought it was a great opportunity for us to demo Superfeedr with a simple use case : how can we agregate all the content published by the Official Bloggers in real-time on the main LeWeb’s site?
How-to
LeWeb’s site uses Drupal. The idea was to automatically push notifications from Superfeedr to Drupal so that whenever one of the official bloggers published an article, it is immediately linked (with a small excerpt) on the main LeWeb site.
Drupal doesn’t seem to have a PubSubHubbub subscriber library (yet?1). However it has an XML-RPC interface. The goal was then to translate PubSubHubbub notifications into XML-RPC. For that I created a very simple Google App Engine application. It basically handles notifications and turn them into XML-RPC calls. 20 lines of code.
To make it a little nicer, I extracted a few information from the standard entry schema : author name and link, as well as categories. With the categories, I did some filtering to make sure we only publish stories that either mention LeWeb or explictly declare that as a tag.
Result
In less than 2 hours (litteraly), I was able to create a pretty good republishing platform:
- No polling at all by drupal
- Guarantee to have real-time content
- Standard schema that allows content filtering and extraction of specific fields
LeWeb starts tomorow and I can’t wait to see you there! Stop by our booth : we have stickers and a few new features to show you!
1 If you’re a Drupal/PHP developer, get in touch : I’m sure such a module is much needed and should replace the aging “feeds” module.
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