Blasta / feeds

PubSub bookmarks

» This is a help guide for feeds of Blasta.

An introduction to feeds

A feed, or "Atom", or "Syndication", or "RSS" (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a mean that allows you to receive news articles and other updates from sites quickly and conveniently through the installation of a Feed Reader (also News Reader or RSS Reader) similar to e-mail.

Through RSS, you can easily receive news updates on your PC, mobile and tablet without visiting the site yourself, which spares the need for you to manually check the site for new content.

Atom Over HTTP

Blasta offers Atom feeds for you to subscribe with your News Reader.

The subscriptions to Atom Syndication Feeds are centralized to the Blasta server.

If you do not have a News Reader yet, please refer to our selection of News Readers.

Atom Over XMPP

Since Blasta is based upon XMPP, Blasta offers PubSub feeds for you to subscribe with XMPP clients such as LeechCraft, Libervia, Movim and Reeder.

Generally, there are two types of PubSub subscriptions:

Peer to peer subscription which allows you to subscribe directly to a Blasta node of a contact.
Peer to server subscription that is exclusive to Blasta which offers its special nodes, such as "popular", "recent", "tag" and "url" variants.

Technically, both PubSub subscriptions are the same, yet the "peer to peer" type of subscription is entirely independent from Blasta.

Which is better, HTTP or XMPP?

It depends on your use case.

If you want to receive immediate updates and save bandwidth then XMPP would be a good choice for you.

If you rather want to be anonymous to the Blasta system or to a peer, and you do not care so much for bandwidth and, perhaps, you also want to be behind a mixnet or proxy such as I2P or Tor, then HTTP would be a good choice for you.

Please note, that most of the XMPP desktop clients do not yet provide graphical interfaces for PubSub, so you might have to resort to the HTTP method, until XMPP desktop clients would provide graphical interfaces for PubSub.

For more information about Blasta feeds, please refer to the feeds legend.

Conclusion

The syndication feeds of Blasta are available in two forms (HTTP and XMPP) and can be utilized via any mean you think is fit to you, be it a Feed Reader or an XMPP Client. You can decide by your own personal preference.