Automated Technorati ping

Technorati, a search engine for searching blogs, allows any blog owner to ‘ping’ his/her blog. In this way Technorati can index your blog based on the tags you assigned to your post.

You can do this manually by requesting a ping with the ‘Technorati ping form’ but let's have a look how we can automate this, shall we? Turns out it's really easy to do so even though it's hard to find some documentation about this on Google.

1. First we'll need Ruby on Rails built in XMLRPC protocol and create a new client that listens to the Technorati web service.
2. Next we call the weblogUpdates.ping service method and pass the name and URL of our blog. We'll keep returned result in the result parameter.
3. Now we only need to check if the request succeeded by looking at the result parameter and we are done.

  require 'xmlrpc/client'
  server = XMLRPC::Client.new('rpc.technorati.com', '/rpc/ping')
  result = server.call('weblogUpdates.ping', 'YOUR BLOG NAME', 'YOUR BLOG URL')
  if result['flerror']
     flash[:error] = result['message']
  end
  

Resources

• XMLRPC for Ruby, Standard Library Documentation