Consuming RSS feeds with PubSubHubbub
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under app-engine, python, xmpp, coding, pubsubhubbub, tech
Frequently, it's necessary or useful to consume an Atom or RSS feed provided by another application. Doing so, though, is rarely as simple as it seems: To do so robustly, you have to worry about polling frequency, downtime, badly formed feeds, multiple formats, timeouts, determining which items are new and other such issues, all of which distract from your original, seemingly simple goal of retrieving new updates from an Atom feed. You're not alone, either: Everyone ends up dealing with the same set of issues, and solving them in more or less the same manner. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to let someone else take care of all this hassle?
As you've no doubt guessed, I'm about to tell you that there is. I'm speaking, of course, of PubSubHubbub. I discussed publishing to PubSubHubbub as part of the Blogging on App Engine series, but I haven't previously discussed what's required to act as a subscriber. Today, we'll cover the basics of PubSubHubbub subscriptions, and how you can use them to outsource all the usual issues consuming feeds.
At this point, you may be wondering how this is ...