Pinging multiple sites

By Skyr on 7 Nov 2005 at 13:00 UTC

Hi all,

I've found several requests for pinging other/multiple sites - the answers were just hacks in the existing ping.module code. So I wrote a "multiping" module which allows pinging multiple sites.
First, I want to make sure that my previous research is still correct ;-) If so, what would be the next correct step to make the module available to others (publish it on my web site? CVS account? ...)?

Multiping could replace the existing ping module.
Advantages:
- multiple sites (obviously)
- web interface
- On ping failures: Retries to ping the site during next cron run
Changes in behavior:
- No longer uses the ping hook

Comments

well

decon commented 17 November 2005 at 23:30

I don't know what you would need to do but I'd like to find out more information about this module. I'd be highly interested in a pinging module that allows specifying different ping sites and knowing when the ping failed to connect.

Current version on my homepage

Skyr commented 21 November 2005 at 14:04

I've put the current version of multiping on my homepage:
http://medien.informatik.uni-ulm.de/~stefan/linux/drupal
The non-XMLRPC pinging (just a URL) is yet untested.

Is there an update for 4.7?

aventurer commented 6 June 2006 at 05:36

Thanks,

-Dave

Love the module concept, and

PainCoach commented 18 June 2006 at 08:42

Love the module concept, and loads and pings on default settings as offered as a add-on module. But when I attempt to utilize the ADD SERVICE feature of the web interface... the follow error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: form_hidden() in /../../public_html/modules/multiping/multiping.module on line 98

Any idea on fixing this issue with a simple adjustment?

Thanks.

This is due to the lack of a

Skyr commented 10 July 2006 at 16:36

This is due to the lack of a decent 4.7 port :) I just recently updated my site to 4.7 - I'm working on the port right now.
You can get a working version for 4.7 on my homepage. (The installer is yet untested, so there may be some problems)...

New release - 1.1 for Drupal 4.7

Skyr commented 11 August 2006 at 10:12

I just posted Multiping 1.1 for Drupal 4.7 on my site. New features:

It is possible to automatically select the pinged sites by the taxonomy terms assigned to the node.
The sites can now be pinged during the cron run or immediately after a node submission.
If a ping request failed, the retry time is increased exponentially in order to avoid "hammering" the service.

The module now contains an installer - I've never written a Drupal installer before, so it very well might be buggy :-)

Test the module - and give me some feedback (both on the installer and on the module in general). Happy pinging!

I love the multi-ping mod.

shadex commented 13 August 2006 at 14:51

I love the multi-ping mod. It's made life soooo much easier! Thanks!

You're welcome ;)

Skyr commented 14 August 2006 at 09:28

Glad to hear that! :-)

Why not register the module

Foodster commented 2 October 2006 at 04:26

Why not register the module at drupal? as for more testing can be done by the drupal members/ developer.

Yes, I should do that...

Skyr commented 19 October 2006 at 21:58

...as soon as time permits. Unfortunately, I'm reeeeally busy at the moment :(
But you're right - the module seems to be working quite nicely, so I could risk introducing it to a broader audience ;)

Make it the official 5.0 Ping Module!

eagereyes commented 21 October 2006 at 17:45

Seriously, this should be the new standard module, it's just so much better than the existing one. I love it to death ;)

EagerEyes.org

how to use multiping module

Foodster commented 23 October 2006 at 12:28

how to i configure the multiping if the ping service used post method? and what is the Method name for? what are the available option for this?

and when the option Ping after post is checked, does that mean it will only ping if the new content is posted or updated.

Person who loved FOOD and DRUPAL

Re: how to use multiping module

Skyr commented 23 October 2006 at 15:52

Method name: If the ping service uses XML-RPC, this is the name of the remote RPC function. On most services (like Technorati, see tech doc), it is called "weblogUpdates.ping". If you use a service which receives the ping simply by requesting a specific URL (which contains your Blog address, etc.), just leave the field blank.

Ping after post: The default drupal behaviour is to ping during the cron run, which is usually once per hour. If you check "ping after post", pinging is done immediately. In any case, pings are only sent if there are new or modified posts, of course.

Should i ignore this?

Foodster commented 2 November 2006 at 02:46

warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to rpc.technorati.com:80 in /home/mysite/public_html/includes/common.inc on line 374.

When i update/add new content, 2 times out of 10 times i will get this. It is safe to ignore this? as i do not sure whether it is caused by technorati. Thanks

Person who loved FOOD and DRUPAL

Network problems?

Skyr commented 8 November 2006 at 10:18

Hm, sounds like some network problem to me. This can be caused due to:
- DNS failure (your server is unable to resolve rpc.technorati.com)
- For some reason, your server cannot establish a connection to technorati (some link down)
- technorati is too busy to properly process your connection (rather unlikely)
Though - two out of ten is rather often...
Multiping shoud observe the failure (see logs) and retry the ping after some time (see logs once again). The retry time interval sould be several minutes at the least (cron runs) - if they occur too fast, chances are that technorati considers this behaviour as spamming.

Multiping uses the Drupal default methods for getting/posting the ping data, so it is (hopefully) not a Multiping-related problem :) If the retry intervals are too short, this _is_ a Multiping issue.

To sum up: If the retries work (with proper retry intervals), you can ignore the errors regarding the Technorati pinging; but I think it is a good idea to go looking for the reason of the trouble, because that could also mean that your website is unreachable from time to time.

Happens all the time with Technorati

eagereyes commented 9 November 2006 at 02:40

I get errors like that from Technorati all the time. All other sites I ping work fine, and Technorati works after a few tries. So I wouldn't be worried, this seems to be rather normal (I also read a comment somewhere on this site to that effect).

EagerEyes.org

Me, too

mcurry commented 14 December 2006 at 02:52

I get this error a lot, too, with technorati. I just bumped my php.ini default_socket_timeout value from 60 to 120 seconds.

Michael Curry - Exodus Development

Default List Needed

geohelper commented 18 November 2006 at 23:00

Here is a list of pingable URLs, but I have no idea what method each of these use...
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=52431

It would be nice if this module was "officially" added to the Drupal modules page, along with documentation and a default list of URLs.

Most people who download this module will want to ping as many services as they can.

It would be very useful for this module to add 5-10 of the top services by default upon installation.

I've only tried these 3...
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping (weblogUpdates.ping)... failed
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 (tried blank & weblogUpdates.ping)... failed
http://api.feedster.com/ping (blank)... ok

Anybody have a working list they'd care to post?

Here's my list

eagereyes commented 19 November 2006 at 17:29

Technorati fails quite often, so give it a few tries (multiping will retry after some time and eventually succeed).

Here's my list. They all use the standard weblogUpdates.ping
* Technorati: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
* Ping-O-Matic: http://rpc.pingomatic.com
* Feedburner; http://ping.feedburner.com
* Feedster: http://api.feedster.com/ping
* Blo.gs: http://ping.blo.gs/
* Weblogs.com: http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

You should be able to add most others in exactly the same way, since they all use the same API.

EagerEyes.org

Thanks man but

Foodster commented 21 November 2006 at 23:51

Thanks eagereyes, i find the list is rather useful. We should keep the link rolling but i have a question, ping-o-matic service ping most of the services like technorati, feedster, feedburner, blo.gs etc so do we still need to add those services into multiping?

i agreed, technorati fails quite often, these why i unchecked the Ping after post, because i find that it rather slow in posting.

Person who love FOOD and DRUPAL

just some update, blog.gs

Foodster commented 13 January 2007 at 06:37

just some update, blog.gs has been acquired by yahoo, so this is their new ping http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/.

Person who loved FOOD and DRUPAL

pinging technorati

jeffspanos commented 27 November 2006 at 06:07

Skyr's module is great! And the only service I'm having problems with is pinging technorati... for some reason, drupal is sending all of the comments from my website, but not the stories or blogs. how can that be corrected?

Technorati trouble...

Skyr commented 29 November 2006 at 12:50

A "ping" doesn't send anything - except the site URL and the RSS URL (the latter being optional according to the standard, but multiping sends it). After receiving a ping, the pinged service (e.g. Technorati) requests the page content and processes it.
When searching the web for similar problems (Technorati only sporadically recognizes changes on my site and occasionally picks the wrong article text), I found several posts which indicate that Technorati sometimes has some general problems with Drupal (or vice versa). Unfortunately, I found no howto for fixing that.
I have the feeling that Technorati doesn't use the RSS feeds, but parses the HTML pages. If this is true, that would mean that the Technorati problems are theme-dependent... but as I already mentioned, this is just a vague feeling.

error message when module enabeled

3dsoft commented 29 November 2006 at 11:12

I get this error message when enabling this module:

user warning: Column count doesn't match value count at row 1 query: INSERT INTO `multiping` VALUES (1, 'Ping-o-matic', 'http://rpc.pingomatic.com', 'weblogUpdates.ping', 0, 1, 0); in /var/www/techline/httpdocs/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 121.
-----------------
www.joelle.de

Fixed (hopefully)

Skyr commented 29 November 2006 at 12:44

I forgot to update the initial SQL statements when modifying the table structure... should be fixed (latest version is published on my web site).

Thanks for this Skyr. A few

TheWhippinpost commented 29 November 2006 at 15:15

Thanks for this Skyr.

A few days ago I d/l v1.1 but found only one file named: "multiping_4.7-1.1.tar_"... which didn't work.

So I "fell-back" to v.1.0 which appears in all the right places etc... but I'm not 100% sure it's actually pinging anything, but it's early days.

I just re-downloaded your latest and again, there's only one file similarly named to the previous v1.1

Error?

Mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A simple thanks to those that help, a price worth payng for future wealth.

sigh

Skyr commented 30 November 2006 at 12:55

I don't know why Drupal inserts the underscore when uploading a .tar.gz file :-( I just fixed it on my site (patching the database manually - argh!)
Remove the underscore (i.e. rename to multiping_4.7-1.1r1.tar.gz), the file is perfectly ok.

I should'a perhaps added

TheWhippinpost commented 30 November 2006 at 15:08

I should'a perhaps added that this was the case when un-tarred, soz.

Mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A simple thanks to those that help, a price worth payng for future wealth.

Ping when updating unpublished nodes

eagereyes commented 20 December 2006 at 14:09

Here's a little bug report. Since this is not a project, I can't open an issue for it.

Multiping pings when nodes are updated that are not published. This is important, because sites like pingomatic might consider pings without changes in the visible content spam. It also should be a fairly easy fix, I guess. I am usually working on several postings at once, and don't want to have a ping go out every time I save a node to work on later.

EagerEyes.org

Thanks - fixed

Skyr commented 3 January 2007 at 09:37

Thanks for the info; I hope I fixed it. The updated version (multiping 1.1r3) is on my site.

btw: I'm a rather irregular visitor of drupal.org - in case of any bugs, please post an additional comment in my blog.

Works, thanks!

eagereyes commented 4 January 2007 at 13:40

Thanks for the fix!

EagerEyes.org

Ping when updating unpublished nodes

eagereyes commented 20 December 2006 at 14:10

Sorry, this got posted twice for some reason ... so much for spam ;)

Drupal 5 port...

Skyr commented 17 January 2007 at 15:04

Hi all,

I'm sorry to say that I'm very busy at the moment - but I definitely plan to update multiping for Drupal 5.
In the meantime, I found that someone else started to patch the module:
http://www.howforge.com/porting-multiping-module-to-drupal-5
I've only had a quick glance at the patch, so there's not much I can say about it - but if you have to update right now, it's certainly worth a try.

drupal5 port, cant get it working

housetier commented 23 February 2007 at 12:32

I had my hopes up but sadly I can't apply the patch successfully. I explained the problem at howforge.com.

Maybe a smarter person can shed some light on this issue? :-)

Works great!

oleykin commented 4 February 2007 at 14:36

Thank you for this wonderful module,

Does it make any sense making the ping list longer than just a few major ones (like technorati)?

43vents.com | Let your negative emotions out...

v1.2 for Drupal 5.1!

Skyr commented 28 March 2007 at 08:32

I finally did it :-) The latest release (with some minor new features) for Drupal 5.1 is on my page:

http://stefan.ploing.de/linux/drupal

It's been running there for three weeks now without any problems - so I hope it will work on your sites too :-)

Skyr, love multiping, thanks

wyn commented 19 October 2007 at 23:55

Skyr, love multiping, thanks so much for sharing it.

Just a heads up that the version I downloaded says "5.0-1.2" but multiping.info says "5.0-1.1". Minor discrepancy but just a heads up.

Very nice module

bytecoders commented 7 November 2007 at 20:19

It's a very good idea pinging multiple sites.
As we have seen a good results from testing why not consider this project to be integrated in Drupal site.
Could be easier to track updates to the module, for people like me that use the module Update Status to keep the site updated.
Thanks for your work.