PubSubHubbub: frustrated with Superfeedr
Slightly frustrated with Superfeedr, the real-time feed service Tumblr uses. Tumblr pays them some socking amount to do the dirty and implement the notification hub, but I’ve had trouble getting it to work. Subscribing is fine, but they just don’t deliver updates. They should come within seconds, but sometimes come very late or not at all. I’m using Feedburner now, ironically, which has its own feed scraping service, and automatically adds Google’s appspot hub to any feed, and that does work. Unfortunately, Feedburner scraping can’t deliver realtime; it just guarantees that I do get notifications if I subscribe to the Feedburner feed at appspot.
What makes it seem like a bug to me is that Feedburner should be able to interface well with Superfeedr. I don’t trust my own PubSubHubbub implementation, but if anyone can get it right, surely they have? So, I’m aroused by the fact that sometimes I get Feedburner notifications properly instantly, within one or two seconds of posting, which is simply not possible with polling—the probabilities don’t quite add up. So, it seems Feedburner subscribes when it spots a hub and avoids polling where it can. On the other hand, they sometimes get notifications very late, which suggests to me that they must be having the difficulty getting pings from Superfeedr that I am. All very dodge.