How does the Six Apart Update Stream work?

Just like we automatically publish XML feeds for your blog, Six Apart provides an endless stream of updates from the blogs that we host. The most popular search engines and feed readers all subscribe to our Update Stream to get your blog's posts as soon as you create them.

If you're familiar with the idea of "pings", which notify these services to let them know when you've updated your blog, this technology does the same thing, but in a much more efficient way.

How does this help my blog?

In the past, you've been able to send notifications to let services know that you've but dated your blog, but the unfortunate reality is that most of the popular services that handle these updates, or pings, have been overwhelmed by spammers. And even if a pinging service does do a good job of filtering out the junk, simply handling the volume of content that's published in the blogosphere can be tough. So we wanted to add another option for our bloggers that bypasses the pinging system entirely.

The bottom line: Your blog content shows up in search results and feed readers faster and more reliably.

Why do these popular services trust the Six Apart Update Stream?

At Six Apart we try to be meticulous about reducing blog spam. While nobody's perfect, this works pretty well. For example, almost no spammer wants to put in a credit card to pay for a TypePad subscription, and Six Apart has never accepted money from spammers for hosting spam content. As a result, these search and feed reading services trust that they're getting good data from the Six Apart Update Stream.

Does it cost anything to consume the feed?

Absolutely not. We provide this service free of charge and free of any restrictions.

What about private posts? Do I need to worry about people reading content that I mark as private?

Only posts that are marked as "public" are broadcast to the stream. If you use LiveJournal and only want friends and family to see your post, that post will not ever appear within the stream. Furthermore, if you have marked the post as public, but have indicated through a preference that you don't want us to publicize your content, we ensure that your content is not indexed by those consuming the stream.