Joseph Scott's Blog » ping

History of PING

Joseph Scott — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:32:38 +0000

Do you feel like other unix geeks look down at you because of their superior knowledge of unix history? Tired of being called a young wiper snapper because you’ve only been using unix systems for ten years? Here is something that can help.

The Story of the PING Program. To really ramp up on the geek points you’ll have to get familiar with The Story About Ping at Amazon, specifically this comment from early 2000.

Now you’ll be able to contribute to the old unix geezer talk around the water cooler.

Bloglines Finally Supports XML-RPC Ping

Joseph Scott — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 03:12:52 +0000

Bloglines has resisted adding an XML-RPC ping interface in favor of simply polling feeds for updates. That has finally changed with the announcement of a new ping interface. You can find the details on the API documentation page under the Ping API section.

PINGQueue.com

Joseph Scott — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 06:29:56 +0000

Some months ago I sat down and spent some time thinking about Ping-o-Matic and what sort possibilities there are in that kind of service. I started putting some ideas down on paper and talked to Jim about it, we agreed it sounded interesting so I started writing up some code. Thus PINGQueue.com was born.

I’ve gone through a couple revisions of the code and database and I’m fairly happy with where things are at. There are still more features that I’d like to add, some for users and others behind the scenes, but for now I think it is at a good starting point. So go and try it out, especially if you are looking for possible Ping-o-Matic alternatives.

You can submit pings via an HTML form at http://www.pingqueue.com/ or use the XML-RPC function weblogUpdates.ping at http://www.pingqueue.com/rpc/. If you are using WordPress then you can configure it to automatically ping PINGQueue via Options -> Writing -> Update Services (at the bottom of the page) and put in the URL http://www.pingqueue.com/rpc/ in the textarea and click on the ‘Update Options’ button.

PINGQueue.com has its own blog (with RSS Feed) and a contact form if you’d like to ask questions.

So try it out and let me know what you think.

New Ping Service Testers Needed

Joseph Scott — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 03:29:42 +0000

I’ve been working on a ping service comparable to Ping-o-Matic, with the goal of providing a much faster response time for users. I’m at the point where I need an initial batch of users to try it out and provide feedback before it goes completely public. If you are interested then drop me a note using my contact form and I’ll point you to the website.

Google Sitemaps

Joseph Scott — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 05:35:36 +0000

Last summer I wrote some thoughts about something like a mod_ping for Apache so that search engines could be easily notified when pages on a site change. I was trying to abstract the idea of pings and trackbacks in use by blogs into a general feature that could be used for any site, even one made out of static files.

The announcement about Google Sitemaps reminded me very much about my mod_ping idea. It isn’t the same, but the goal seems to be the same, providing a way for search engines to discover URLs and when they change. SearchEngineWatch has an article about it which provides a brief overview of what Google is up to. More information can be found in the help for there sitemap generator tool (and the Source Forge site for the tool), the Google Sitemaps FAQ and the Sitemap protocol page.

They specifically mention a hope that servers (Apache & IIS) will support this in the future. In the mean time you can manually ping Google for sitemap updates using something like curl, wget or even your web browser I suppose. I’d expect this feature to be built into certain web tools, like blogs and content management systems. I’m sure someone will get around to writing a tool for WordPress to generate a sitemap file, adding to it each time an entry is published and then ping Google to let them know it has been updated.

Will other web search companies adopt this? Keep an eye on Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, A9 and IceRocket to see if this goes anywhere. I don’t think that this will be limited to the “traditional” search folks, I’d think that someone at Technorati, PubSub and maybe Bloglines might come up with some clever uses for this. If we are really lucky people will learn from history and come up with something like feedmesh for sitemap pings.

For now I’ve whipped up a very basic sitemap file at http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/sitemap.xml and pinged Google to let them know about it.