To truly subscribe to a blog, one needs push technology. This is found in IM solutions. Here’s an experiment:
When you publish a new entry on your blog, your blog software has a routine where it pings the links contained in it. During this time, it could also launch a small script that does the following:
- Once launched, the script connects to a JabberID that was made just for it.
- It proceeds to recieve subscribe and unsubscribe messages from other people that have sent it IMs while it was offline.
- After updating it’s subscriber list, it sends out a link and a short description of the new entry to all the subscribers.
- It checks again to see if any subscrbe or unsubscribe messages have been recieved.
- It finally disconnects and terminates.
Thus, this bot never actually runs for more than a few seconds. Others can’t put it in their roster, but can still message it. It uses XMPP’s offline messaging to queue up subscription requests, as well as enabling the client to recieve new post info while they are offline.
Sure, this can be done with SMTP, and it already is. However, both POP and IMAP are still poll based. Even IMAP servers can’t really inform the client of new messages.
Another solution is for the publisher to update their status message in their IM client whenever they publish something new.
