Pinging Technorati from Your Blosxom Blog
Technorati is quickly becoming one of the best ways to track what blogs are linking to eachother, which news items are being talked about the most, and who is linking to your blog.Telling Technorati that you've updated your blog is fairly simple, and there's a multitude of ways to do it, from filling out a simple web form each time you update to using the XML-RPC API they provide to automatically "ping" the site.
This is already set up for users of LiveJournal and other popular blogging havens, but the "blosxom setup" section has been woefully empty since technorati came back online a few weeks ago. I finally decided it was time to "put up or shut up" and figured it out myself.
How to install the technorati XML-RPC pinger on your blosxom blogger:
install SOAP lite with the XML-RPC api
How I debugged the existing pluging and tweaked it to make it work
I was able to build upon an existing XML-RPC plugin for pinging weblogs.com by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. Ideally, I should have been able to plug in a simple configuration variable and run, but there were some problems with the plugin as it stood.
First, there was a small perl syntax error, at least on linux. I found the error by running
In order to ferret out the problem, I set the debug level up to 1, and began to watch my apache logs.
Finally, I added a Technorati entry to the array of sites to ping, cleaned up some of the code I had used while debugging, and re-posted the plugin to blosxom.com - we'll see if Rael wants to update the existing plugin or fork it into another specific to Technorati.
Well, it's late again, but this was fun!
