Elytra Blog

The simple RSS Reader. This blog publishes release notes, engineering and design details.

RPC First Class Support

Back in December 2018, I wrote a post about RPC Pings support in Elytra. I cannot believe it has been that long. Later in 2019, I promised to bring first class support to blogs that implement RPC pings to Elytra. 

I have just finished implementation and it is now live. To recap the steps from the earlier blog post, let’s assume you have a WordPress Blog. 

…if your blog runs on WordPress, you can add the following URL: https://api.elytra.app/rpc-ping under > WordPress Blog’s Settings > Writing > Update Services. 

That’s it. WordPress handles all the complexities for you. If you use Micro.blog, you can find instructions here. You can adapt that shortcut to send RPC pings for any website you host as well as to any other service other than Elytra. 

Here’s what happens in the background:

  1. Your website/script sends an RPC ping to Elytra.
  2. Elytra immediately processes your website’s RSS Feed. 
  3. Any new posts are added for your subscribers to read. 
  4. Additionally, users subscribed to your blog’s push notifications from the iOS and iPadOS Apps are sent a push notification.

Starting today, 29 Mar, 2020: Once your blog sends at least 5 pings every 14 days, Elytra will no longer poll for changes to your RSS feed. Elytra will then assume that you will send RPC pings every time content on your website is updated. If no RPC pings are posted for 14 days, Elytra will once again begin polling changes at regular intervals until the 5 pings are received and the cycle can repeat. 

So you get the benefit of real-time updates, push notifications and no penalties for downtime. This hugely benefits users using a blogging platform like Github Pages, Micro.blog, etc. that don’t inherently support WebSub yet. You can use this for your WordPress based blog as well if you don’t want to install the WebSub plugin for whatever reason. 

Starting with v1.7, users of the iOS and iPadOS apps will also be able to subscribe to feeds for Push Notifications which use RPC pings. 

I invite your feedback on this feature if you decide to implement and make use for it. For any questions, please feel free to email me at support@elytra.app. Enjoy Reading. 

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Elytra December Update

In this post, I wanted to quickly write down a couple of notes for you to read at your leisure. 

  • There is no release scheduled for this month however I am working on a fix release scheduled for next week to fix a couple of bugs reported by one of the newest users of Elytra. Thank you, Tim! 
  • The next big release is scheduled for after 15th of January 2019.
  • I am continuing to improve the API for Elytra which powers the sync services, automated account creation, OPML imports as well a lot of the real time logic which brings push notifications from certain blogs. 

Real Time Updates

The last point from the above list has kept me wondering, how can I improve the situation where publishers can ping Elytra’s API to notify it about new posts. 

After looking in to how WordPress operates, the answer was obvious: RPC Pings. Starting today, if your blog runs on WordPress, you can add the following URL: https://api.elytra.app/rpc-ping under > WordPress Blog’s Settings > Writing > Update Services. 

That’s all you have to do. This won’t immediately enable your readers to receive real-time push notifications for your blog, but it’ll enable the sync service to immediately fetch new posts. I’ll be working on bringing push notifications to your readers in the coming week. Once that is enabled, the API will no longer periodically poll your Blog’s RSS feed and will solely rely on this mechanism. If you can configure the above setting, I highly recommend that you do. 

Recommendations

I have been tweaking how recommendations are selected, over the last week and I am pretty happy with the results now. Currently, the recommendations are purely based on anonymous statistics which detail which articles were read the most eventually surfacing the Feeds they belong to. In the coming few weeks, this will change to using a combination of anonymous statistics to further randomise and give better recommendations. 

The new system will also remove feeds you are subscribed to so that the recommendations become true recommendations for you instead of a generic “Whats Hot!” list.

Data & Statistics

The core of the Recommendations section has been this anonymous data collected directly on the server based on the articles you read. Since this data is in no way tied to any user account and it reveals a lot of information which publishers may find useful. Early next year, I plan to release a dashboard for Publishers to view this data. Just like the iOS app, the dashboard website will have a private and then a public beta. The final release will be available at nominal fee of $1/month for subscribing publishers. 

Your personal data is never collected by Elytra and as such no information about you can be included in the above stats. If you’re a publisher and would like to be included in the Private Beta, give me a shoutout on Twitter or DM me. 

Closing Notes

I have nothing more to write, so I’ll leave you with my best wishes for the Holidays. Cheers. 

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