WordPress blogs get near-real-time updates
After a blog post is published to a website, it takes some time for Really Simple Syndication tools, like Google Reader or Bloglines, to update their feeds and alert readers to the new post. But now, none of the 10.5 million WordPress.com blogs will suffer from that lag time.
WordPress announced Wednesday that its blogs now support PubSubHubbub (PuSH, for short), a service that "pushes" blog updates to an RSS reader. WordPress employee Joseph Scott wrote on the company's blog that new Wordpress blog posts would show up in subscriber RSS feeds within seconds of their publish time. Previously, posts sometimes took much longer to arrive in a user's feed.
It should be noted, however, that PuSH won't affect the blogs themselves. As soon as a blogger clicks "publish" from within WordPress, the new post will be instantly available to site visitors. PuSH only accommodates those readers who access a blog's content from an RSS tool.
Companies or individuals that use the WordPress content management system on their own websites can also use PubSubHubbub after downloading a PuSH plug-in and adding it to their WordPress installation.
Web users want access to content as quickly as possible, which makes services like Twitter and Facebook so valuable. But blogs have had trouble keeping up. PuSH and its ability to deliver new blog posts to a user's RSS feed within seconds could even the playing field.
-- Don Reisinger
