Bloggers love being promoted inside apps like FanPulse! We also love it when we can depend on some awesome people to write great sport posts to help people keep up with their favorite teams and games. The problem is, lots of infrastructure needs to be put together on the backend to support the synchronization of our algorithms with the premium content from blogs and news sources. Superfeedr fortunately has some tricks for me to automate the process of adding and removing sources on the fly.
When a new source is added to our database, I fire off an after filter that subscribes Superfeedr to that feed. When the source is destroyed, I also unsubscribe with Superfeedr. The API makes it super easy. Here are some examples from FanPulse's Rails framework:
Adding a feed to Superfeedr to subscribe to:
I have a few constants in there that are specific to our app.
- SUPERFEEDR_URL = 'http://superfeedr.com/hubbub'
- SUPERFEEDR_LOGIN = my_superfeedr_login_name
- SUPERFEEDR_PASSWORD = my_superfeedr_password
- SUPERFEEDR_CALLBACK = my_servers_callback_method
I'm using the RestClient gem by adamwiggins to make the calls, as you can see it's pretty darn easy. "hub.topic" is the url for the feed, "hub.callback" is the url I want future feeds to be pushed to using webhooks as well as subscribing internally, "hub.verify" should be set to sync since we're not doing an asynchronous call, and lastly "hub.mode" is set to subscribe since we want to add this new feed.
There are a few slight subtleties I did not mention, including the fact that your callback has to implement the basic PubSubHubbub subscribe / unsubscribe spec as usual. That will have to be in another discussion though.
Lastly, if you want to destroy the source from your database, just make sure you hit the Superfeedr API to unsubscribe the feed as well.
Hope that helps! Big thanks to Julien for all the support and help getting FanPulse running smoothly with the awesome Superfeedr.
