XMPP PubSub on WordPress.com

Just some notes on how to get XMPP notifications from any wordpress.com blog. It’s an experimental service so might not work tomorrow 😉

I use the Pidgin IM client. You need an account on wordpress.com.

  1. Add a new account to your IM client.
  2. The username and password are your wordpress.com credentials
  3. The domain/server address is ‘im.wordpress.com’
  4. You need to add a ‘buddy’ to this account so you can receive notifications from it. The buddy name is ‘bot@im.wordpress.com’
  5. So now you’ve connected to the wordpress.com subpub service and made friends with their bot.
  6. Next, open a chat window with the bot and type ‘help’
  7. You’ll see a message like this:

(10:51:54 PM) ‘bot@im.wordpress.com’: Here I come to save the day! Pubsub bot is on the way!
My prime directive is to deliver blog posts and comments as soon as they are published. I am only a hack. If you can speak Pubsub (XEP-0060) you don’t need me.
Subscribe to a blog and I will deliver posts. Subscribe to a post and I will deliver comments.
Commands: sub/subscribe, unsub/unsubscribe, subs/subscriptions
Try these:
sub en.blog.wordpress.com
sub en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/march-wrap-up-2
sub en.blog.wordpress.com/comments
You can subscribe to any public WordPress.com blog. Private blogs are available to members. Please limit yourself to a reasonable number of subscriptions.
This service is experimental and subject to change or termination without notice.

Unlike RSS feeds, you can’t get notifications from tags or categories (actually, I haven’t tried categories, but tags didn’t work)

Isn’t it GREAT! 🙂

For self-hosted blogs, the Jabber Feed plugin is our greatest hope. The difficult bit is getting the server side stuff set up but I’m going to try to do that over the next few days and will post any notes here.

18 Replies to “XMPP PubSub on WordPress.com”

  1. Awesome, so extending this idea, can we get something like this hacked into the P2 theme and have the blog posts and twitter feeds of a specific community feed into a frontpage on something like UMW Blogs. I want the redesign for next year to provide a way to show in real time, like a chat window but a theme in WPMu, to show select blog posts, tweets, images and the like for a specific community. I am extrapolating out of WP/WPMu here, but I really think a front page that captured the community pulse via a number of services would be awesome.

  2. Not sure about re-publishing via XMPP to a WordPress blog. The wordpress.com example is blog -> XMPP client. I’ve not come across any blog -> blog examples. Can a blog act as an XMPP client? We need to see if there are any examples of this in the wild. I’ve not come across any WP examples of this.

  3. If you’re using Adium on OS X, you need to choose the ‘Jabber’ account option. In this instance, your ‘Jabber ID’ is your_wordpress_username@im.wordpress.com and your password is your wordpress.com password. Under the Options tab in the account manager, enter ‘im.wordpress.com’ as the ‘Connect Server’. That should connect you. Then go on to add ‘bot@im.wordpress.com’ as a contact on that account.

  4. Very cool. Just to clarify: are you running the XMPP bot yourself? Or is this an official wordpress project? A little confused on those points. 🙂

  5. It’s an official, experimental, wordpress.com project. Try it for yourself 😉

    1. Julien, notifixio.us looks good. Are your notifications from RSS actually ‘realtime’ ? Like XMPP PubSub is in my experience. A delay of more than a 5-10 seconds when expecting realtime notifications is a bit like waiting a few seconds for a web page to load.

  6. Joss, we’re real-time when we have access to a real-time stream (SixApart’s Atom Stream, Identica’s XMPP stream… etc)… and not when we don’t have access to such a feed. However, we also use SUP (friendfeed) and a few other ‘helpers’ to detect updates as soon as possible.

  7. Did WordPress.com implement that as a plugin that WordPress instances hosted elsewhere might benefit from ? I’m excited – and notifications from tags or categories will make it even better !

    1. No, it’s an experimental wordpress.com service for now. I just learned about it from a passing Tweet by one of the core WP developers. I did ask whether it would be made available for tags and categories but haven’t had a response.

      For self-hosted blogs, as I mention in the post, the Jabber Feed plugin is about implementing PubSub as an extension.

      http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jabber-feed/

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