Update your Mobile Website in Real-time Automatically

The MobStac platform has been designed from the ground-up to synchronize content with a website automatically without any human intervention, and with a latency for updates of less than 1 minute. We’re often asked about how MobStac accomplishes this. Read on to know more about the technology behind this.

Our servers fetch new content and keep up with updates to the publisher site through a standard content-syndication mechanism called RSS.

RSS/Atom Feed Processing

Most Content Management Systems (CMS) automatically update one or many RSS feeds when content changes anywhere on the website. By examining these RSS feeds for changes, MobStac is able to pick them up as soon as they happen.

The MobStac platform inspects various fields in the RSS/Atom feed to extract the necessary information:

• title
• description
• category
• author
• source
• pubDate
• content
• enclosure

The platform also supports custom extensions to the RSS specification, allowing publishers to pass on additional information for display on the mobile site. Examples include: custom priority values specified by the publisher, related stories, keywords, etc.

Push and Pull Mechanisms to Fetch Feeds

MobStac employs a combination of push and pull mechanisms to fetch feeds and detect changes to content as quickly as possible.

Push Mechanisms

The platform is integrated with the latest advancements in push-based feed publishing such as PubSubHubbub and fully supports the protocol for real-time update notifications.

PubSubHubbub is an open protocol for distributed publish/subscribe communication on the Internet. It provides a mechanism for publishers to make HTTP calls to “hub servers”, notifying them of updates to the content on their sites.

In addition to PubSubHubbub, MobStac’s plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla incorporate a push mechanism to notify our servers that content on the main website has changed. On receiving push notifications whenever content is updated, our servers process the site’s RSS feeds immediately, pulling in all updated content.

Pull Mechanisms

In the event you are running on a CMS that cannot use either of the 2 push-based mechanisms supported by our platform, you can still rely on interval polling for content synchronization.

MobStac polls your RSS feeds at a predefined interval to check for updates to content on your site. Each feed is polled every 60 minutes by default, with the option available to Enterprise customers to modify this value to whatever they wish – even 1 minute!

What happens after my feed is polled?

We guarantee that the content on your mobile site will be updated within 1 minute of the feeds on your site being polled, ensuring the minimum possible latency in content synchronization and display.

Even though MobStac leverages caching aggressively at edge servers and the client device to ensure blazing-fast load times for your mobile site, we guarantee that updates to stories are always reflected on all mobile devices immediately, without anydelay due to cached pages and assets inside edge servers.