Website Design & Marketing

Tags: blog ping, php, xml-rpc

If you are familiar with blogosphere you know what is Technorati.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. You can submit your blog to Technorati and ping their servers when your blog site is updated. when you ping Technorati their web crawlers read the updated information on your site.

Technorati offers an XML-RPC ping web service to allow blogs to notify content changes.

In this article we discuss how to write a PHP script to programatically ping Technorati when there is new content in your site.

The URL to ping is rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping.

The method name to call is weblogUpdates.ping.

The request XML must contain two parameters – your blog site name the blog site URL.

From the API documentation of Technorati, the sample request XML is as below:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
  weblogUpdates.ping
  YOUR WEBLOG NAME HERE
  http://www.YOURWEBLOGURL.com/

Let’s start writing the XML-RPC client to ping Technorati.

Our first step is to generate the required XML request string.

<?php
$site_name = "YOUR WEBLOG NAME HERE";
$site_url = "http://www.YOURWEBLOGURL.com";
 
$request = xmlrpc_encode_request("weblogUpdates.ping", array($site_name, $site_url));
?>

The function xmlrpc_encode_request as the name suggests, creates the request XML string. If you echo $request variable you will see output like below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
 
weblogUpdates.ping
 
   Benzing Technologies
 
   http://benzingtech.com

The next step is to create the streams context.

<?php
$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array(
    'method' => "POST",
    'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nUser-Agent: PHPRPC/1.0\r\nHost: rpc.technorati.com\r\n",
    'content' => $request
)));
?>

The code snippet states that we are preparing to make an HTTP POST request to the server rpc.technorati.com.

The next step is to make the request.

<?php
$server = "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping";
$file = file_get_contents($server, false, $context);
?>

We now decode the response XML using the function xmlrpc_decode(). We determine whether the response XML contains a fault structure using the xmlrpc_is_fault() function.

<?php
$response = xmlrpc_decode($file);
if (is_array($response) and xmlrpc_is_fault($response)){
    echo "Failed to ping Technorati";
} else {
    echo "Successfully pinged Technorati";
}
?>

The entire script is pasted below.

<?php
$site_name = "Benzing Technologies";
 
/**
 * The URL of your site
 */
$site_url = "http://benzingtech.com";
 
$request = xmlrpc_encode_request("weblogUpdates.ping", array($site_name, $site_url));
 
#echo $request;

$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array(
    'method' => "POST",
    'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nUser-Agent: PHPRPC/1.0\r\nHost: rpc.technorati.com\r\n",
    'content' => $request
)));
 
$server = "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping";
$file = file_get_contents($server, false, $context);
 
$response = xmlrpc_decode($file);
 
if (is_array($response) and xmlrpc_is_fault($response)){
    echo "Failed to ping Technorati";
} else {
    echo "Successfully pinged Technorati";
}
 
?>

The source code is available from the Code Album Github repository.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under PHP / MySQL, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.