Aha! Thanks 
While I’m here, how many feed updates does Newsblur get? It occurred to me that things could be improved if you just move the whole service over to PuSH and subscribe to feeds using SuperFeedr. It would probably turn out to be cheaper and feed updates would be faster for everyone.
I’ve met with Julien Genestoux of Superfeedr. Wickedly smart guy. Unfortunately, the cost is prohibitive. Maybe one day, but for now I do a lot of smart handling of feeds and extra work. I could move to it, but it would be a whole lot more expensive for the amount of feed fetching that I do, along with the number of subscriptions I have.
Feed fetching is a mission critical component of NewsBlur. Best not to out-source it so you have complete control.
As a point of reference, I have 4 task servers, which cost $20/month each. So that’s $80/month to fetch nearly a million feeds a day, along with 2M+ page and icon fetches to go with them.
Yeah, wow. I didn’t know you had so many feeds, I see why Superfeedr isn’t really an option. Keep in mind though that they claim that they will beat the cost of your existing system. You just need to contact them.
I can understand wanting total control though, makes sense.
I’ve been having this problem as well on this feed: http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/f…
It claims to do PuSH but it’s never once done so, so it only updates when I manually do an insta-fetch. Perhaps if a blog claims to do PuSH but never actually pushes, it could just be marked as not having (working) PuSH after all?
That’s a great idea, but I couldn’t figure out where to draw the line for PuSH-enabled feeds that never push. It’s a bit dangerous to assume that they should be pushing when there is a new story on a manual fetch but no pushes. It’s not so easy, but I am investigating and counting these types of lapses.
I’ll try to get a fix for this out somebody soon. I just have to build a proper decay for push.
Just thought I’d update you, now NONE of my feeds have real time update, even those that once did.
Yeah, this needs to be prioritized work. I’ll get on this after finishing the front-end rewrite soon.
Any updates…? I still don’t have anything in real-time.
Are you behind ssl? (Are you hitting https instead of http?)
Also, which feeds say they’re real-time but aren’t getting new stories? Just give the url you get when you open them. A lot has changed in the past 3 months.
Not behind SSL.
Well the main feeds that I have that are real time are Tumblr, so anything like ‘http://.tumblr.com/rss’ has PuSH, Newsblur recognizes that it does and then I don’t get any updates other than fetches twice a day anyway.
Here’s an example: http://irish-hugz.tumblr.com/rss
Checked the site. It’s being fetched every 3 hours, which seems to be working. If you insta-fetch stories, it forces the real-time feed to re-subscribe. But that should be happening automatically. I’m subscribed to it now, so if you notice that it’s incorrect, let me know.
Thread revival, since I ran into this problem immediately after subscribing. Had a long discussion with SuperFeedr’s Julien Genestoux and your support, first about my own feed: http://www.newsblur.com/site/3972118/…
Your support advised me to implement PuSH, Julien helped with that and confirmed it worked fine. Then you switched it over to real-time… but it’s not. Julien checked that NewsBlur had not actually subscribed to the hub, even though stats claim it’s real-time and the actual check delay is now an amazing 72-90 hours.
For my feed that’s not urgent since I’m currently the sole subscriber on NewsBlur anyway. However, I noticed another feed (Pocket Tactics) with 81 subscribers that claims to be real-time but isn’t: http://www.newsblur.com/site/1219226/…
Updates come at the ~2 hour checks, not when they’re published. That’s a feed that goes through FeedBurner, by the way. Got pushes up to two days ago, then suddenly stopped and no more notifications. FeedBurner trouble?
Issue is still around for me too by the way, just didn’t bother saying anything.
Here’s an example feed: http://smallerontheeoutside.tumblr.co…
A thought: If or when NewsBlur attempted to subscribe to my feed on SuperFeedr, did you omit or include the end slash?
http://news.kynosarges.org/feed/ – note slash at end!
I just went to check whether Google’s PuSH hub (the other one I link to) got my pings. Amazingly, that hub does not simply ignore the end slash! It reported zero pings & fetches for the URL without the slash, and the correct number only when I included the slash. Something to check for?
Perhaps this has something to do with it?
“”
That’s in the /feed/ XML response.
Maybe it’s going through that and not the Link header?
I’m sorry, what XML response are you talking about?
The one received when someone makes a request to the URL you posted.
Ahh, sorry, the code I pasted didn’t work because formatting.
There are two atom links in the http://news.kynosarges.org/feed/ response:
atom:link rel=“hub” href=“http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com”
atom:link rel=“hub” href=“http://pubsubhubbub.superfeedr.com”
My guess is that since they’re just set to the hubs, those requesting the page don’t have anything else to go off?
I’m not quite sure how exactly an RSS reader picks up the PuSH URL in the first place though. Maybe this is an entirely valid response.
I think I’ve been pretty clear. I’ll do what I can to be clearer:
See the two atom:link elements I’ve described (Ctrl+F it if you can’t see them straight away).
No, this is the canonical way to notify PuSH hubs, and it’s inserted that way by the standard WordPress plugin. The feed URL itself is repeated within the feed as the rel:self link (with trailing slash!). Moreover, both Google’s and SuperFeedr’s hubs have already accepted this feed, they get pings and subscriber requests. SuperFeedr support even double-checked that everything was fine.