WordPress Plugins That Saved Me This Week: PubSubHubbub

PubSubHubbub. Say it with me: PubSubHubbub and then say it 10 times fast! Come on, I know you can do it! So what the heck is this PubSubHubbub for WordPress any way? Simply put, it’s a way to get the stuff from your blog to notify the internet of your new content only faster. I used it and it helped us this week on a project.

PubSubHubbub isn’t just a funny name. It’s a service and if you’re using WordPress.com, it’s enabled by default.

Here’s what WordPress says about this nifty plugin:

PubSubHubbub (PuSH)
PubSubHubbub (also known as PuSH) provides a way for services to subscribe to new entries in feeds (RSS & Atom) when they are published. It ensures new content gets syndicated more quickly, in real-time.

The gist is that PubSubHubbub ensures that other services know about your content, quicker.

For our purposes, we used the PubSubHubbub plugin developed by Matthias Pfefferle and Josh Fraz.

We have a client that needed to ensure that their content was getting pushed out to one of their partners who uses RSS to process their content and, in turn, redistribute to their network of subscribers. It’s a simple process and happens via RSS, of course.

The problem was that the partner’s proprietary RSS tool wasn’t finding the new posts in a timely fashion. I’d remembered PubSubHubbub from another project and recalled what it did. Could it work this time, too?

Reaching out to the 3rd party client in this case was the first step. The second step was to install and activate the PubSubHubbub plugin, and the final step was to create content. That’s it. You can clock-out and go home.

In this case, PubSubHubbub was what we needed; our client’s partner began to see new posts within a few minutes of publishing and helped them avoid any nasty dustup with their partner. All in all, a win-win.