About

BlogPing is a PHP web application in the vein of Ping-o-Matic. It allows people using services such as Blogger to notify weblog aggregators and services such as Weblogs.com, Technorati, Bloglines, and others that their weblogs have been updated.

Who is this aimed at?

Well for a start, it’s not a competitor to Ping-o-Matic.

BlogPing grew out of a need I had to ping a number of regional weblog aggregators, namely IrishBlogs.ie and Planet Journals. As my site ran on ColdFusion 5, it wasn’t practical for me to write the code for pinging in that language, so I wrote a proxy in PHP to do the job. Later, when the code began to stabilise, I decided to open up the source to whoever else wanted to provide a similar service for their local blogosphere.

So I guess you could say it’s targeted at people who want to start a local service similar to Ping-o-Matic to ping local weblog aggregators and weblog search engines.

Can I see it in action?

The first site to go live with a copy of BlogPing was the Irish Weblog Ping Proxy, which has moved around quite a bit, but found a permanent home there. If you want a demonstration of what BlogPing is like, head there.

I’d host a demonstration copy here, but SourceForge doesn’t appear to let me open outgoing sockets.

Once there are a few more sites out there using BlogPing, we’ll start a page listing them.

Where can I get it?

Download BlogPing 1.6. Full instructions are included.

What are the minimum requirements?

I believe it ought to work on PHP 4.1 and onwards, but I’m only comfortable recommending PHP 4.3 and onwards. It will work just fine on PHP 5 and has no dependencies. However, if your hosting provider doesn’t allow outgoing socket connections, all bets are off. Also, if your hosting provider doesn’t compile expat support into their copy of PHP, you’re out of luck too. However, considering that it’s been part of the basic PHP install since PHP 3, it’s highly doubtful you’ll have problems there.

Any other things I should know?

The software is covered by the MIT License with an extra clause stating that the license is covered by Irish and EU law. That last bit’s important.

Er, you know those badge things everybody slaps everywhere...?

Yes, we’ve one too. Pop this in your markup:

<a href="http://blogping.sourceforge.net/"><img
    src="http://blogping.sourceforge.net/assets/images/badge.png"
	width="80" height="15" alt="I &#9829; BlogPing"/></a>

Feel free to download the image and host it yourself. Here’s what it looks like:

I ♥ BlogPing