[FYI] Update links 1.5

I don’t wish to demand that everybody be forced to check blogs.com or whatever it used to be, but I’d like the option. It’s easier to change my behaviour than everybody elses. I don’t wish to be in a WordPress ghetto of non-updating blogrolls!

Well, I just started using the cron job with 1.5 (before with 1.2 I was running the plugin). It’s obviously doing something — but as gregorsmith said above, it’s only showing WordPress blogs updating. Other blogs that I know are updating aren’t showing up as updated anymore and this is frustrating. Is this because Pingomatic doesn’t know about them? Is there anything we can do?
(Edited to add: Ack, I posted this having read the first page of replies, not realizing there is a second page. I see others have said much the same thing. So I’ll just add my voice to the chorus. Apparently most of the blogs I read aren’t pinging Pingomatic.)

I’ve got it working somewhat, but the times are still incorrect. Is there a way to modify the time that’s displayed?

Working? Working how? Checking something other pingomatic? Pray tell.
Sorry, I don’t know anything about the times.

the times are still incorrect

Yeah, I don’t know anything about it either. At the very least, my blogroll shows that it was recently updated. It’d be nice if there was a way to configure that, of course. I’m not plugin developer, though – I wish. =/

The times haven’t updated because wordpress isn’t getting any new times from ping-o-matic, so the time displayed is the last time it updated to.

I sent a note to ping-o-matic yesterday, asking what the appropriate workaround was going to be, since so few people are pinging ping-o-matic:

Beyond sending pings, do you have any plans to actively look up other pinging services, so catch updates you missed? Or maybe some other workaround that doesn’t involve me evangelizing on your behalf?

Matt Mullenweg wrote back:

Well I would of course recommend evangelizing, but we do plan to expand
checking to include blogs that ping weblogs.com, we just didn’t want
that to hold up the release of WP 1.5.

So basically, they’re planning on setting up ping-0-matic to check weblogs.com, but it hasn’t been set up now.

In the mean time, I’m thinking about seeing if I can get the old links-update file to work. Probably bad, but I need something to work ??

Not to be offensive here (though I’m sure it will be taken that way) but it seems a bit silly that the update links would be tied in with ping-o-matic, simply because Matt and Dougal are running that as well, when there was no problem with the pinging of weblogs.com to update links, apart from the occasional time it would be down…

Surely they would have realised the people would notice that their sidebar wasnt showing updated links…

And if that’s Matt’s “official” reply then it just reeks of self-promotion, as if it’s not enough for us all to be preaching about wordpress, we have to pretty much convince people to ping ping-o-matic as well…

*sigh*

oh well…

*bump*

I don’t suppose he mentioned a likely timetable for this, did he? I mean, two weeks I can live with; six months, OTOH, would be supremely frustrating.

No offense on my part, anyway.

Of course it’s shameless self-promotion. You expect them to not promote their services? Nevertheless, ther WAS a problem with welblogs.com. And it’s spelled MOLASSES. Weblogs had terrible response times, and little responsiveness from the people maintaining it. The problem is that they released 1.5 before getting ping-0-matic up to par AND not telling anybody about it.

But then, somebody could theoretically use the old links-update file, or create a plugin that adapts it to 1.5. (obviously, I haven’t tried yet)

In defense of Matt and Dougal:

Weblogs _is_ unreliable. And depending on the way in which you call update_links.php, that may or may not be a problem. If you have set up a cron job, then no worries, but if you have the old links updater plugin installed, and your blog is waiting for weblogs.com before it loads, then timing out, etc. can become a big problem.

Blo.gs is another option, that seems much more reliable. However, they have stopped using the changes.xml type service, in favor of a streaming service. This makes it much more difficult for a program like WordPress to get updates from such a service. It would be better if such a service was first parsed by a server such as Ping-O-Matic, then accessed by WordPress users as needed.

That said, I agree that Matt, Dougal, et al. should provide a clear timeline as to when Ping-O-Matic will implement this.

I am currently working on a plugin that will parse an RSS feed of favorites and use it to update links on your blogroll. It is designed to work with blo.gs favorites, and it will use the LastRSS library, including cache functions. This will allow it to be run using a hook every time the page loads without overloading the blo.gs server. I am not a programmer by any means, but if/when I am able to get this fully functional, I will make it known on this forum.

I have created such a plugin. See https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic.php?id=25356
or go to my blog to download a copy.

My cheap solution was a flop. I don’t have time just yet to try thefreefood’s plugin, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a very useful solution for my needs.

Thanks though!
KB

How do I run a “cron job”?

Is there a timeline for pingomatic getting a wider set of update stats?

It would be great if WP 1.5 will tell us when most bloggers who don’t ping pingomatic but ping other major ping sites have updated.

I just keep rechecking this thread every couple of days, hoping for news… my blogroll is so pathetic now, with only three of the blogs showing as “updated” since Feb 20. ??