WebSub

They work, but they all had paper cuts.

We've talked before about how WebSub, which is really just a rename of PubSubHubbub, because why would you not rename that horrible thing? But WebSub was a similar to a thing called RSS Cloud, which Dave Winer pioneered back in the day, and then- WebSub kind of took those ideas and fleshed them out a little bit more, made it a little bit more generic, and became a fairly robust open standard, and then there was a WebSub 2, but I don't think anybody really adopted that.

But WebSub was an attempt to solve the RSS feed updating problem, generally speaking, not just for podcasting.

So if you had an RSS feed that updated with a new item or some other change to it, how do you let all your n- subscribers know that there's a change, that they need to go and pull the RSS feed again? So WebSub tried to do that by making a sort of registration server.

So the PubSub or WebSub server would register a lot of subscriptions.

So you're talking to the WebSub server and you say, "Here's a feed.

I wanna know every time that feed gets updated, and so here's a callback," a webhook in modern parlance.

"Call me back whenever this thing updates.

I can tell you that.

And the reason is that they need to support a protocol called WebSub, Web S-U-B, right? And WebSub is where RSS feeds can be immediately updated as soon as an update is seen on the server.

Podcast Addict has supported WebSub for years, but this guy says, oh, yeah, I might do it one day, you know, because I asked him about it.

Oh, right,

okay.