rullzer

Over the last week I have been reading up on xmpp, I started out with reading two RFC’s: 3920 and 3921. These gave me a more in depth understanding of xmpp. However I am mostly interested in the publish/subscribe extension for xmpp (XEP-0060).

Publish/subscribe can be used for a lot more (see XEP-0163) but one of the most logical implementations to start with would be publish/subscribe as a rss-polling replacement. Right now a lot of people get updates for a website via an aggregator, this basically works by fetching an rss or atom file on a given interval and then parsing the result. Lets say your interval is 1 hour, then a worst case senario would be that you get the update 59 minutes later than it is published. A “solution” would be to set the interval to 1 minute. However this creates unessesarry bandwidth (and load) to the server.

For all this publish-subscribe seems to be the solution. The best way to see it is as a one-way chat. When a news items (or blog post or whatever) is post an item is published to a node. That node then sends out the notification to all subscribed clients. It is clean and simple (for a more in depth explanation you should read the XEP or google a bit!).

Now it would be awesome to see this implemented in some aggregator (especially Akregator since I am a kde-man), of course that would have to be done in such a way that I can use my existing JID (Jabber-ID) but that it does not appear online or receives other messages.

I think a good way to start is for me just to check-out the sources of Akregator, yet another project

Since my webhost had a php upgrade some the php scripts that generates the bash.org rss feed did not work any more. However after some minor fixes it now works like a charm again!

According to the statistics many of you use my bash.org rss feed. The traffic generated by this feed has grown over the last year and right now it is around 70% of the total traffic of this website (around 600MB a month).

Just out of principle this is a bit much for a RSS feed so I decided to move the feed to feedburner. Thanks to a .htaccess rule the feed is already forwarded. This means that current subscribers to the feed should not notice anything

Happy reading

I really like bash.org. However there is no RSS feed available for the latest quotes. This makes me sad. However after a 15 minute php session (which was more than enough php for me) it is working.

Checkout my bash.org rss feed. It updates every 15 minutes. Enjoy