Friday night I implemented a new feature for my Pompiedom empire for realtime RSS feeds. At some point on saturday I realised that I had made a small mistake (it depends how you look at it, of course).

Today I thought a bit about the different parts of a Realtime RSS ecosystem and I found the following parts

• The cloud, a mechanism for subscription and notification of feeds. You can subscribe to a feed and the cloud will send a notification if something changes.
• Storage, stores new feed items and provides feeds to readers. Pings the cloud if a new item is added.
• Authoring, an interface for create new items in a feed. Sends the new items to the storage.
• Reading, tools for reading the feeds and can be notified by the cloud when new items appear in feeds.

Parts of this system can be combined into one program, but it’s not needed, because of the protocols that are used. Each part can be a separate program and multiple programs can implement the same part.