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.