PuSH Bot lets you receive notifications via XMPP of updates to feeds that support PubSubHubbub (commonly abbreviated to PuSH). This means that you can receive updates from Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal blogs, Google Reader shared items (R.I.P.), any FeedBurner feed and many other sources to Google Talk or any other Jabber/XMPP account.

PuSH Bot runs on App Engine, and does not have billing enabled. Thus it is likely that it will run out of quota in the latter part of the day. If you're interested in reliability, you may wish to grab the code and run your own instance.

Basic Usage

Subscribing

  1. Add push-bot-hrd@appspot.com to your contact list (note the -hrd suffix -- this is an artifact of an App Engine migration).
  2. Send it a subscription message by using the /subscribe command: /subscribe http://example.com/feed.xml
  3. If all goes well, you should see a confirmation message like Subscribed to http://example.com/feed.xml
  4. Whenever that feed updates, you'll get a notification of the form:
    Update from Some Feed:
      Post Title Goes Here: http://www.example.com/post.html

Note that you do not have to specify a feed URL, if you instead use a webpage URL, PuSH Bot will attempt to look for an auto-discovery element in it, and if it finds a feed, subscribe to that instead.

To see all of the feeds you're subscribed to, send the bot the /list-subscriptions command.

Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe from a feed, send the bot the /unsubscribe command: /unsubscribe http://example.com/feed.xml. If you'd like to unsubscribe from all feeds, you can use the /unsubscribe-all command.

Advanced Usage

To see a list of all commands that PuSH Bot supports, you can use the /help command.

OPML Import

If you'd like to subscribe to many feeds at once, you may find it convenient to generate an OPML file from your existing feed reader and import that. Assuming your OPML file is reacheable at a URL, you can use the /opml-import command: /opml-import http://example.com/opml.xml. PuSH Bot will parse the OPML file and extract all feeds URLs from it, and will attempt to subscribe to each one. Note that large OPML files may not be imported completely since the request may time out before all subscribe requests are issued.

Using in conjunction with Partychat

If you are using Partychat (in its App Engine incarnation known as Partychapp) then you can invite PuSH Bot to a room and have it notify you of feed updates there. There are two steps to the process:

  1. In the room that you wish PuSH Bot to join, issue the /invite push-bot@appspot.com command.
  2. Separately, send a message to PuSH Bot saying /join-partychat roomname@partychapp.appspotchat.com (replacing roomname as appropriate. If it all goes well, the bot should appear in the room and announce that it joined.

Once the bot is in the room, you can address it by prefixing your message with "push-bot: ", for example push-bot: /subscribe http://example.com/feed.xml (this is so that PuSH doesn't get mixed up between Partychat commands and ones meant for it).