net.nemein.ping was the original experimentation ground for MidCOM’s content update notifications support. However, it had since fallen into disuse as it waited re-implementation using MidCOM’s at service to ensure pings are run asynchronously.

Then I saw this blog post in my RSS reader:

Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly.

I immediately saw the opportunity to refactor some old code, and so now net.nemein.ping 1.0.0 is out and available. It supports several blog directories including Google and Technorati, and runs the pings in at service registered for next minute after an article is published or modified.

Note: Even thought Google announced their service, it doesn’t seem to be working yet. From MidCOM’s debug log:

Oct 05 21:57:13 [debug] net_nemein_ping_pinger::ping: Successfully pinged rpc.pingomatic.com
Oct 05 21:57:14 [debug] net_nemein_ping_pinger::ping: Successfully pinged rpc.technorati.com
Oct 05 21:57:15 [warn] net_nemein_ping_pinger::extended_ping: Error pinging blogsearch.google.com:\
5 Didn't receive 200 OK from remote server.\
(HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found)

Updated 2006-10-06: Google has now fixed their ping interface:

Oct 06 07:54:16 [debug] net_nemein_ping_pinger::extended_ping: Successfully pinged blogsearch.google.com

In somewhat related news, Alexander Schuster has just released beta release of Aegir 1.0.4, the first update to the legendary Aegir administrative interface of Midgard since July 2004. Cool!