Time for a non-propietary weblog-ping service?

January 15, 2002 11:07 PM

Time for a non-propietary weblog-ping service? It seems Winer is picking and choosing which blogs get listed on his ping-service depending on his whims. Is it time now for the weblog community to move away from this?
posted by owillis to general weblog-related at 11:07 PM (15 comments total)

Funnily enough, weblogs.com doesn't receive pings from my MT blogs (although I hasten to add I can't be sure the fault is on weblogs.com's side). But others have had this problem too.
posted by D at 11:51 PM on January 15, 2002

D -- I'm not sure what the problem is, but I don't think it is on weblog.com's side. I'll email you privately and see if we can figure out what's happening.
posted by mgtrott at 11:56 PM on January 15, 2002

It worked with my movable type logs for a little while, just after the 1.31 upgrade, and then it mysteriously stopped. I have been assuming it was because I wrote him en email once, but shurely it can't all be about me?
posted by walrus at 3:34 AM on January 16, 2002

"An" email. If my spelling was that bad, I deserved it (and I always spell surely that way when I'm being sarcastic).
posted by walrus at 3:37 AM on January 16, 2002

The guys at winerlog have had the same problem. See for yourself.
posted by gi_wrighty at 5:52 AM on January 16, 2002

The weblogs.com ping still works with my MT blog (v1.4).
posted by briank at 8:15 AM on January 16, 2002

for those who wish to use another service, linkwatcher has been available for nearly as long as weblogs.com.
posted by rebeccablood at 10:25 AM on January 16, 2002

hmm, i had been looking at something new to do with the blo.gs domain.
posted by jimw at 10:35 AM on January 16, 2002

briank: yeah, it's definitely not a common problem amongst MT users, so it's not that weblogs.com is blocking MT blogs. Hopefully we can sort out the glitch.

Sorry to MT-hijack the thread again here.

posted by D at 11:24 AM on January 16, 2002

blo.gs = weblogs.com + blogtracker

plus a number of sharp corners. and minus the trackerpane and tinytracker (for now).

it also incorporates the information from linkwatcher. i might fold in linkwatcher-like functionality eventually.
posted by jimw at 7:59 PM on January 16, 2002

here's blogtrack which I haven't looked at because you need an account to use it....
posted by rebeccablood at 8:36 PM on January 16, 2002

I've been using BlogTrack for a few weeks now. I've been quite pleased with it. The big advantage it offers over blogtracker is that it works for sites that don't ping weblogs.com (and, obviously, sites that's aren't just weblogs).

It's a bit slow (by necessity, since it actually compares the new site with the last time you checked), but it's a handy way to keep track of a set of sites that only update a few times a week or less.
posted by stevengarrity at 9:08 AM on January 17, 2002

I've just been experimenting and it appears pinging is working for one of my MT logs and not the other. They're both allowed, but one had changed and the other hadn't, so one of them must have pung.
posted by walrus at 9:29 AM on January 17, 2002

I used to have problems pinging Weblogs.com while I was adding this feature to b2, it got fixed by displaying just what exactly W.com got and the response from it, because I could see some bugs in my ping, that I couldn't see earlier. Tried that with MT ?

To get back on track, I don't think censoring words such as 'big penis' is so offensive; and I would take winerlog's word with a bit a salt, please :)
posted by michel v at 12:39 PM on January 17, 2002

A "non-properietary" version of the weblogs.com already exists. It's called JBleep. I designed and built it, and released it as open-source under the GPL. It runs as a Java Servlet/JSP web application (I have it deployed under Tomcat). It accepts pings in SOAP, XML-RPC, and HTML-Form using the Weblogs.com API, and it syndicates output in all the same XML formats as Weblogs.com. It has configurable support for categories. It can (I believe) be deployed in a matter of minutes, and customized by tweaking the JSPs.

The reason I built it was not because I dislike Weblogs.com. In fact, I love Weblogs.com. It's fantastic, one of the best things on the web.

But that's its problem. I saw quickly that it was going to get very popular, and that soon it would decrease in its effective functionality because of its own success.

The future of it lies in categorization, and also of people setting up their own communities, i.e., their "own versions" of Weblogs.com. This is exactly what my application was intended to allow: the setting up of weblog communities by anyone who wanted.

Right now JBleep is implemented as an open service. That is, if you deploy it, anyone can ping it (there is spam filtering in it, as well as validation of changes). In the next release, it will include the ability to define user accounts, so that only weblogs that have "joined the community" can ping. The openness of joining a particular community will of course be determined by whoever is deploying the application.

I hope this contributes meaningfully to this thread. The download is here. It comes with a Java Swing client that works with any weblogs.com-compatible service.




posted by jamsterdam at 5:33 PM on January 19, 2002