Technorati, a search engine for searching blogs, allows blog owners to “ping” their blog. This way Technorati can index updated blogs based on the tags assigned to a post.

You can do this manually by requesting a ping with the “Technorati ping form” (since defunct), but let’s see how we can automate this. It’s easy to do even if the documentation is sparse.

1. First, we’ll need Ruby on Rails built-in XML-RPC protocol and create a new client that listens to the Technorati web service.
2. Next, we call the ‘weblogUpdates.ping’ service method and pass the name and URL of our blog and keep the response in the result parameter.
3. We now check if the request succeeded by looking at the result parameter.

require 'xmlrpc/client'
server = XMLRPC::Client.new('rpc.technorati.com', '/rpc/ping')
result = server.call('weblogUpdates.ping', 'YOUR BLOG NAME', 'YOUR BLOG URL')
if result['flerror']
   flash[:error] = result['message']
end

Resources

• XMLRPC for Ruby, Standard Library Documentation