What is PubSub? How does Gush and PubSub work together?

is a service that continually scans the Internet for content. Using Gush, you can tell PubSub what kind of content you want delivered to Gush using a query. A query can be as simple as "Jon Stewart" or something more complex such as "Martha Stewart" AND imclone AND SOURCE:nytimes.com. Once a query is added to the PubSub service, any content found by PubSub will be delivered into the Gush newsreader. Gush maintains a permanent connection to the PubSub service, so you receive new content instantaneously after PubSub discovers the content off of the Internet.

Setting up your PubSub account.

After logging into Gush, you must enter your PubSub details in the Gush Preferences window. If you don't already have a PubSub account, you can click on the "New User" link to take you to the . PubSub.com will ask you for your email address and email you the password to be used with your account.

Once you have your PubSub password, enter your email address as the Username and the Password as provided in the email. Press the Connect button. The connection status should change to "Connected" if the information was added in correctly.

Note: If you're using Gush behind a corporate firewall then you may have to change the connection options via the Setup button.

Adding a PubSub feed.

To add a PubSub feed, change to the News panel in the Gush's sidebar. Adding a PubSub feed works just like adding a regular RSS/Atom feed by using the context-menu on a News group.

The Add Newsfeed... option will pop up the dialog that will offer to add either a regular RSS/Atom feed or a PubSub feed. Click on the PubSub radio button and then on the Next button.

Now for the interesting part. The Subscription Name will be the name as show in the the News panel. You'll be able to rename it at a later point, but it helps to pick a descriptive title from the outset. Below Subscription Name field is the Search Terms field. This is where you query should go for news items that you'd like PubSub to match and include in this feed.

The Include Descriptions option is if you want the full-text for the incoming items otherwise only the title will be shown for the entry. Include high-volume weblogs and journals will include personal blogs on LiveJournal and so forth that tend to be less authoritative than topic specific blogs. Limit result to the top x% of sources allows you to use PubSub's heuristics to stem the flow of news items for a popular search search such as "John Kerry".

Once Finish is pressed, a new subscription will be created with PubSub and the feed will appear in the Group where you choose to add the PubSub feed.

Reading the news.

Once new items arrive for the PubSub feed, you can double-click on the feed in the News panel to open the newsreader. The items will be shown in reverse chronological order just like any other news feed.

Since the number of items arriving for a PubSub subscription can be overwhelming and cause the page to refresh too often for reading, Gush includes a mechanism to pause updates. The Pause button is right below the feed title in the Newsreader. If paused for long enough, the number of queued items will be shown next to the Pause button. Clicking on the Pause button again will result in the feed being updated immediately with the queued items included.

Updating a PubSub subscription options.

By clicking on the the feed in the News panel, the context menu will be shown. To change the PubSub subscription options, select the Setup item. A dialog for changing the options will be shown that's identical to the dialog used for adding the subscription as shown earlier on.