Hey, this rocks. [[blo.gs]] has a feature whereby you can get it to ping you when it gets a ping. You tell it about your server with an XML-RPC call, and it’ll then notify you when anybody updates, either by calling an XML-RPC method or POSTing some data to a page on your site.
In Python, you can get it to call you with XML-RPC (calling the function weblogUpdates.cloudPing) like this:
#!/usr/local/bin/python
import xmlrpclib
print xmlrpclib.Server(‘http://ping.blo.gs/‘).weblogUpdates.registerCloud(
‘http://my.server.com/RPC2’,
‘xml-rpc’,
‘weblogUpdates.cloudPing’,
‘my random token’,
)
(Replace my.server.com with your server name and my random token with some text of your choice).
This code will print out a number. That’s the number of hours (25 for me) for which it’ll retain your server details. After that (well, before that) you have to call it again if you want to stay connected.
So, anyway, I had just made the Topic Exchange support the Weblogs.Com API so you could put http://topicexchange.com/RPC2 in your Movable Type ping list and connect to it directly, but then I found out about this blo.gs cloud thing, so you don’t need to ping the Topic Exchange — just ping [[blo.gs]] and the ITE will hear about it a few seconds later. Nice!
What this means is that the Topic Exchange now has a nice little weblog updates page. It’s showing 1694 pings right now - wow.