It seems there’s always a technology or service threatening to revolutionize the internet. Promising to change the way we access information and how we use it.

In the past it was “web 2.0″, “web 3.0″, “crowd sourcing”; the list goes on!

Silicon Beach Training offer programming training including Python Training and Ruby on the Rails Training in Brighton, Sussex.

Recently, “Real Time Web” has entered the arena, it sounds great but in practice, few people have a clue what it is. Simply put it means web resources are published and consumed in real time.

Real Time Web

As as soon as “stuff” is published, a blog post or any other user generated content, it is syndicated around the web and indexed immediately. The most obvious example is google search including up to the second results from twitter. Social media is all about real time, streams of information created constantly and consumed almost instantly (find out more with out social media course).  Broadcasting your location in foursquare is pretty useless if people only find out a few hours/days later! Real time web can be thought of as another paradigm of the social web experience.

For a while only the big boys, Google, Facebook and Twitter and others have made use of these real time data streams, with us peons only able to use RSS and ATOM to get our content out there. Recent developments by both Google and WordPress have put this real time power at the disposal of every blogger and content creator on the web. If you are thinking of using WordPress and need help check out our WordPress Training and our Advanced WordPress Training courses.

You’re probably thinking how does this differ from RSS and ATOM? Well it doesn’t, its an extension to both those protocols to allow for real time publishing, but how exactly have they done this?

What is PuSH or PUbSubHub?

The very definition of “Real Time Web” is to have content consumed in real time. PuSH or PSHB (many names and acronyms have been used in discussions but from here on out I’ll only use PuSH as it best describes what it does) is a protocol that allows RSS and ATOM feeds to change something that you need to ask for into something that is given to you.

Quite simply, it works like this

1. A blogger or content creator creates a feed and specifies a hub (see Where are these hubs bub? below)
2. A consumer subscribes to the blog using the RSS feed in the normal way
3. New content is created and the source pings the hub saying “i have new content!”
4. The hub in turn “fat pings” the subscribers saying “Hey, the blog has new content, here it is!”

Here’s a cheesy video that illustrates PubSubHubBub!

Download Video

This all happens within a few seconds of the content being published, thus satisfying the “real time web” definition!

How can you jump on this real time bandwagon?

There are three steps to real time publishing,

• set up your feed with a hub
• pushing your content to a hub
• grabbing other peoples stuff from the hubs.

Before all of this you will need a firm grasp of RSS and ATOM.

For those of you that have your blogs hosted by WordPress you need to do zip, nada nothing!  They have already implemented everything you will need. If you have a WordPress blog but host it yourself, you can head here to find the plugin’s.

How to PuSH your content

The simplest way to quickly start using this to get your content out there is to head on over to Feedburner and create an account.

Add your content feeds,

hit publicize,

select PingShot and press activate and your feed is set up as a PubSubHubBub feed!

If for some reason you don’t like simplicity, or more likely you want more control over the publishing and retrieving then you’ll have to set up your RSS feed that includes hub forwarding information. To do this you’ll need to change part of the RSS feeds XML structure with a couple of lines of code.

Where are these hubs bub?

To implement PubSubHub youself you’ll need a hub. You can either create your own (which requires a fair bit of programming knowledge) or you can use one of the public hubs

• App Engine reference hub — http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com by Brett Slatkin
• Superfeedr hosted — http://blog.superfeedr.com/api/http/pubsubhubbub/pubsubhubbub/ by Julien Genestoux
• RabbitHub erlang — http://github.com/tonyg/rabbithub/#readme by Tony Garnock-Jones and Alexis Richardson
• Miyamoto python/twisted — http://github.com/progrium/miyamoto by Jeff Lindsay
• WebGlue ruby — http://github.com/zh/webglue/tree/master by Stoyan Zhekov
• !Subfeedr perl — http://github.com/miyagawa/Subfeedr by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
• PubSubHubbub-rb ruby — http://github.com/barinek/pubsubhubbub-rb by Michael Barinek
• SubHub Django integrated hub — https://code.launchpad.net/subhub by Ivan Sagalaev

More information is available at google with tutorials and information on how to create a hub and start feeding the world your real time content.

How to grab other people stuff from the hubs

As always there are two ways to get real time blog updates.

The quick way is to start using an RSS reader that supports PubSubHuBBub, there are quite a few, but these are limited to web only readers and leading the pack is Google Reader with Bloglines, Bloglovin and Netvibes bringing up the rear.

The second option is to create your own PubSubHuBBub reader or modify an existing RSS widget to receive instant updates. Again consuming a PubSubHub message can be quite challenging so an understanding of web programming is needed, specifically server side scripting (take a look at our PHP/MySQL training course)

You can try this by heading over to our Feedburner page and subscribing and you’ll receive new blog post immediately after posting.

That’s all there really is to it. So go ahead and start publishing in real time, you’ll notice the difference straight away!

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