Superfeedrfall

You may have seen RSSfall, which I blogged about a month or so ago. It uses PubSubHubBub (PSHB or PuSH or Hubbub for short) and Comet to stream RSS feed updates to your browser in realtime.

Someone else working in the realtime RSS space is Superfeedr. Superfeedr is an API for subscribing to RSS feed updates, a bit like Hubbub.

So what’s the point?

What’s great about Superfeedr is that they combine polling, Hubbub, rssCloud, and several other ‘Helpers’ to stay on top of RSS (for more, read their technology page). They guarantee that you will receive an update within 15 minutes. In fact, if you don’t, it’s free. That’s how much they believe in their system.

Julien Genestoux CEO and founder of Superfeedr contacted me about their competition to make something cool with their new ‘river’ API, which – to be brief – is a way of getting at the stream of data going through Superfeedr. He said he’d be interested in seeing a Superfeedrfall; RSSfall using their river API.

Within a couple of hours, I presented a very rough around the edges Superfeedrfall. It looks very similar to RSSfall, but you’ll notice that you receive a new update every 3 seconds or so (the speed of the stream they made available for the competition).

Superfeedrfall!

How does it work?

I put together a quick piece of Erlang that builds upon some of the code I’ve written for Twitterfall but instead connects to Superfeedr rather than Twitter. I then got that to parse and send the results to a Hydrometeor instance for it to send to any subscribers. When you visit Superfeedrfall, you are one of those subscribers, so you receive the update in realtime.

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