pushl 0.0.2

A conduit for pushing changes in a feed to the rest of the IndieWeb

Pushl

A simple tool that parses content feeds and sends out appropriate push notifications (WebSub, Webmention, etc.) when they change.

See http://publ.beesbuzz.biz/blog/113-Some-thoughts-on-WebMention for the motivation.

Usage

Setup

First, you'll want to have your Atom (or RSS) feed implement the WebSub protocol. The short version is that you should have a <link rel="hub" href="http://path/to/hub" /> in your Atom feed.

There are a number of WebSub hubs available; I use Superfeedr.

For WebMentions, configure your site templates with the various microformats; by default, Pushl will use the following tags as the top-level entry container, in descending order of priority:

• Anything with a class of h-entry
• An <article> tag
• Anything with a class of entry

This may become configurable in the future.

Sending notifications

pip install pushl
pushl -c cache_dir http://example.com/feed.xml

If your feed implements RFC 5005, the -a flag will scan past entries for WebMention as well.

You will probably want to run this in a cron job or the like.

Advanced configuration

TODO: whitelist/blacklist for rel links for outgoing WebMentions

TODO

Tool should be pip-installable (DONE)

Mechanisms should include:

• WebSub (DONE)
• WebMention
  • Should notify all extant URLs as well as any which were in the previous version but are now gone
  • but be sensitive to ones with a rel that isn't in a whitelist (e.g. don't want author, self, nofollow, nonotify, navigation, etc)
• Configurable Publ/Jekyll/Octopress/etc. syndication? (i.e. write out syndicated content to $HOME/mysite.example.com/content/syndicated/foo.md, possibly mirroring images locally)
  • Needs to have some sort of configurable template for the headers, with defaults for the more common systems (Publ, Pelican, Jekyll?)
  • Could probably use Jinja2 for this
  • (Is probably out of scope though)
  • (yeah this is definitely out of scope)

Other worthwhile ideas:

• Support RFC 5005 (DONE)
• Detect deletions, maybe? This is a SHOULD in Webmention, and a good idea for the syndication
  • This is a lot easier in RFC 5005 feeds
  • Or possibly, compare set of current items with the items listed in the previous feed retrieval, and send out one last ping/update for the items which disappeared from the feed (since Webmention doesn't differentiate between those two cases)
• Have post-run hooks (for example, syncing syndicated content stores via git-based deployment or whatever)