Implement WebSub?

[ghost]

As of January 2018 WebSub is a W3C Recommendation.

Google does not link to the spec on their site but they do suggest its predecessor, PubSubHubub:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/submit-URLs

My understanding of the intent of this protocol is to inform subscribers (a kind of end user, such as flipboard) of an update on a specific topic made available by a publisher. Benefits include 1) subscribers, such as crawlers, do not need to poll as often for updated info—saving resources across the board—and 2) publishers could better automate content discovery.

Here's more info in English on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub

Beyond that I have not looked into this further but this feels like a good place to raise this for investigation, doc and possible implementation. Curious to hear your thoughts @kaushalmodi.

[kaushalmodi]

I have zero knowledge about WebSub, but I know that it's used for a lot of folks in the IndieWeb community. Though, I don't know what Atom feeds have to do with WebSub, or what kind of support would need to be added.

CC'ing @aaronpk to help join these 2 things.

@aaronpk This project is a theme component for the Hugo static site generator which generates an ATOM feed for user configured pages. I'm trying to understand what that has to do with WebSub.

[jpawlowski]

I understand you may use a hub server to be notified as part of the Hugo post script.
News aggregators may then subscribe to a notification offered by the hub server in order to know when there was a change/update of the feed. The way the news aggregator will find the hub is using a <link> reference in the HTML header.

For example, there is Google PubSubHubbub Hub (which uses the old name instead of WebPub but should essentially be the same).
There is some short info on that page that might be helpful to understand the concept.

However, not sure about the timeout that is mentioned there and how often one would need to re-build the feed file and/or ping-notify the hub (guess it is every couple of days).

Essentially using an external hub like this will likely change your RSS/Atom Feed URL from a clients perspective but not sure.