Blog ping

One drawback with blogger is that it can only ping weblogs.com. But I want to ping some other index sites too. One way is to go to each site and ping manually, but thats to much work. Another solution is to have a script or something that you run after each time you have written a blog entry.
It hit me that blogger can send a mail each time you enter a new blog entry. So I wrote a python-script yesterday that is trigged by these mails an ping sites using XML-RPC. My script, blogping, reads a config file and ping all services listed in the config file. Then I added an email alias in my email server that run the script when a mail comes in. Last I registered the mail address in blogger.
The alias looks like this in postfix:
blogmail: |"/opt/local/bin/blogping.py -c /opt/local/etc/configfile"

The result of the pings are logged using syslog. You can download the script from here. Run the script with the argument -h to get instructions. You do not have to trig it using mail, it can be executed stand alone.

I have tested the script in both Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy.

Comments

Hans Persson said…
It seems to be time for that idea, since I just implemented the same thing, but by using the web interface of the respective service instead. Most of them only require you to fetch a certain specialized URL for your blog, so it's pretty straight-forward.

Perl and WWW::Mechanize are really nice for that sort of thing.

Another reason, of course, for not doing it your way is that I don't have a mail server handy.
Magnus Runesson said…
Hans: The reason I preferd the XML-RPC is that for all services that support this protocol (which is a lot of them) is that I only have to provide a URL that can be found on each service web page. So I do not hav to do any coding at all.

If you using fetchmail and a mailservice (like lysator) that support adding a postfix (not the software) to your username you can send mail from blogger to user+blog@foo.com and let fetchmail run the script.

I think it is only a matter of time until blogger/google supports ping to arbitrary sites.
Hans Persson said…
I definitely hope that Blogger will solve the problem for me sometime soon. Like, I am sure, countless others, I have put a request for that in their ideas queue.

Popular posts from this blog

Circles in PostGIS

Create your own CA with TinyCA2 (part 1)

Create your own CA with TinyCA2 (part 2)