Midnight Oil

So you want on Technorati, huh? You’ve got a website with blogs or at least something that could be loosely considered a blog, and you want more exposure? Well, you’ve come to the right place! Step on in and I’ll tell you all my secrets of getting XML-RPC pinging to work for you, driving the hordes of the Internet to your doorstep! *

Getting onto the syndication services is not that hard. Or, at least that what’s they say. I have had a devil of a time getting the Obsidian Portal adventure logs to show up. By any standard definition they are blogs, and therefore should not be excluded from the syndication services. Still, here I am after a month with very little to show for it. Worst of all, it’s extremely difficult to track down where I’m going wrong.

Under the assumption that someone out there is in the same boat, here are a few tips to help out. I’ve grouped my tips into two categories. “Concrete Advice” covers tips that could definitely make a difference and should be attempted first. “Shots in the Dark” are some ideas I had that may or may not do anything at all. But if you’re desperate…

Concrete Advice

Targets

Rather than searching out all the services, just use pingomatic. You can add any additional ping targets if you wish, but pingomatic has found some pretty good ones.

Testing

Actually testing your pinging is probably the hardest part. You send a ping out into the ether, get a response like “Thanks for the ping!” and then you wait. And wait. And wait.

Sometimes you will have to wait several hours for the blog or post to show up on Technorati. Sometimes it won’t even show up at all. Not knowing if the ping is working is the most frustrating part of the entire experience. That’s where weblogs.com comes in.

Weblogs.com is your testing buddy!

Ever hear of weblogs.com? Neither had I, until I started this journey. Apparently, they’re the wackos who came up with this crazy pinging idea in the first place. To boot, they provide the best way of testing whether or not your ping service is working. They have a list of the most recent pings they’ve received available as an XML file. So, here’s how the testing works:

1. Send a ping to pingomatic. Verify that pingomatic responds correctly (ie. “Forwarding your ping to 16 services”).
2. Get a cup of coffee or something.
3. Download shortChanges.xml (use wget to avoid caching by your browser).
4. grep for the URL of the blog you pinged.

Note: shortChanges.xml seems to be cached on the server side and updated every couple minutes or so, so keep checking if you’re not there right away. After 5-10 minutes, you should either be listed or your ping never made it.

If it’s there, then you can be absolutely sure of 2 very important things:

1. Your ping to pingomatic was successfully received.
2. Pingomatic forwarded your ping to 1 other service successfully.

That may not seem like much, but we can infer (ie. assume) a lot more, namely that pingomatic is forwarding your pings to all the other services. This means that whatever problems you’re having getting registered with the syndication services, it’s not related to your pinging process. So, if you’re still not showing up on Technorati, it’s time to do some more digging.

Are you valid?

Ok, now your ping is working, what’s next? Validate your site and your feed!

The first thing a syndication site will do is pull down your feed and spider your site. You want to be as welcoming as possible when that happens. That means having valid, well-formed XHTML for your site and a valid RSS/Atom feed. Both of these are easy enough to check:

• RSS/Atom Feed Validator
• W3C XHTML Validator

They will tell you what’s wrong with your site. Get it whipped into shape so the syndication spiders find what was promised by your ping.

Extend your best foot forward

Since we’re using pingomatic, we have our choice of a regular ping or an extendedPing. Just go whole-hog and send the extendedPing. It allows you to specify both the site URL and the associated RSS/Atom URL. Send all the info you can to pingomatic, and let them decided what to forward on to the other guys, depending on who can accept it.

“Ping Test” is a crappy post title

When looking for your posts on the syndication sites, make it easier on yourself, and use a test post with easy to search for text. “Ping test” is going to lump you in with all the other people doing the exact same thing. Instead, stick in a string of nonsensical text like “flatly waking Oberon” that doesn’t show up in a Google phrase search. This will make your tests just a little bit easier to find.

Shots in the Dark

Tag, you’re it!

Add a few categories to your post in the RSS feed. A lot of spiders and search engines (as well as blog apps) seem to treat the category field as a place to dump social tags. So, you should too! Even if you have to hard code a few categories in there, go ahead and do it. For the Obsidian Portal adventure logs, every post is tagged with ‘games’, ‘gaming’, ‘rpgs’, and ‘roleplaying.’ Does it help them get picked up? I don’t know. That’s why it’s a shot in the dark.

Check your title tag for your blogs

For a while, I was adding “Obsidian Portal” to the title tag of every adventure log. For the fleeting moments when they were showing up on Technorati, it looked terrible. Suddenly, they all disappeared. It occurred to me that they might have been flagged as duplicates or too similar. Same domain and similar titles. Is that the case? Who knows?

Parting thoughts

I have not had much luck getting listed with Technorati or any of the other services. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. After about a month of trying, I’m about ready to throw in the towel. I’ll keep the pings going, but I’m not going to devote much more time to testing and analyzing whether or not they’re working.

If you do manage to find the secret to getting listed, please speak up in the comments or write a blog post of your own!

References

• XML-RPC ping API – This is what you should be sending to pingomatic.
• weblogs.com shortChanges.xml – This lists all the pings that weblogs.com has received in the last 5 minutes.
• RSS 2.0 specification – Explains what a valid RSS feed should look like.

*Author is full of crap and is still unable to get his site’s blogs listed on Technorati. If you know what he’s doing wrong, please post a comment!