Re: [Mod-pubsub-developer] TrackBack and blogs

[Scott A. L. <sc...@sc...>]

Asynch Messaging wrote:

> Notifications are notifications, and isn't less useful because they are
> really fast.

Yes, but they aren't necessarily /more/ useful, yet, which is why people 
haven't abandoned things like email notifications and RSS polling. 
Polling every 5 minutes is "good enough" for most; otherwise, I figure 
someone would've hooked up Jabber for real-time notification delivery 
awhile ago.

> Did you know that mod_pubsub will do off-site posting via HTTP POST?
> This means that mod_pubsub will relay the notification (aka 'ping') to
> multiple blogs, not just live in-browser clients.

You can already notify multiple blogs without url routing. "Live" 
reactive endpoints (not just in-browser) are part of what makes it 
compelling. But yeah, that's only part of the mod_pubsub story.

> What is wrong with per-entry pub/sub?

Nothing!

> There should be other means to subscribe to the blog itself.
> Think of the blog as a 'collection of entries' and subscribe to that
> collection. Whenever something is added (a POST), you get notified.

Yeah, this is originally what I proposed to Ben when they were tinkering 
with the TrackBack idea. They took it deeper, applying it to 
post-to-post relationships as well as post-to-category/directory.

Actually, I think I see your point now. Instead of having to ping 
several dozen subscribers, interested parties can subscribe to one URL 
and offload the work onto the router. So, yes, it would be cool if 
weblog software were able to emit a non-contextual, TrackBack-compatible 
notification with every update.

>>Personally, I'd like to see the TrackBack ping supplant the weblogs.com
>>ping, because 1) it has more information, and 2) doesn't require XML-RPC.
> 
> Me too. It'll happen over time. RPC helps some quickly bang out demos, but I
> like REST for the long term.

Very much agreed. You wouldn't believe the crap I went through to get to 
that weblogs.com thingy working, and that's only one or two pieces of 
info. The weblogs.com format sends the least amount of info, but 
requires more work to process. TrackBack is just the opposite: more 
info, less work.

scottandrew