Comment by edavis

If anyone is looking to play around with PuSH, http://superfeedr.com/ has been a joy to work with. There's also a reference implementation available at https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/.

It handles all the "dirty" parts of feed reading (checking for new items, normalizing fields) and adds near instant updates for sites that ping hubs.

When I finally get around to writing my own feed reader, I definitely plan on using it.