How to configure WordPress Mu with Google Blog Search Pinging Service

By default, WordPress Mu pings Ping-o-Matic only and it is no longer possible to add new sites with the wp-admin interface: “Sites get pinged by default. That option [to add other Pinging Services] was removed to simplify the interface.” (donncha)

Thus, adding a new Pinging Service (in this case Google Blog Search Pinging Service) requires an update to the *_options table for each blog. Richard Pendergast clearly shows how to do this over on the DevLounge.

For example,

mysql> SELECT option_value
FROM [secret]_2_options
WHERE option_name = "ping_sites";
+----------------------------+
| option_value |
+----------------------------+
| http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ |
+----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> UPDATE [secret]_2_options
SET option_value = "http://rpc.pingomatic.com/\nhttp://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2/"
WHERE option_name = "ping_sites";
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0
mysql> SELCT option_value FROM [secret]_2_options WHERE option_name = "ping_sites";
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| option_value |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2/ |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Open source software is only as good as its user community. This is likely no revelation. It has probably been expressed by others, more eloquent than I, elsewhere. However, my recent participation in the WordPress Mu community and in particular tracking down a really sneaky bug yesterday has prompted me to dwell on the subject.

Of course, a user community is composed of individuals and having some great ones at the core makes a huge difference. This is definitely the case with WordPress Mu. There are really helpful people tirelessly monitoring the forums, answering questions, re-categorizing posts and topics and eventually submitting tickets for the truly worthwhile problems. I wish that I could list those people by name but I’m afraid of leaving some out. I’ll just say that I’ve had help from Dr. Mike in the past and ask for readers (of which I have two, Hi Mom and Dad!) to submit their own favorites.

I think that a community is also impacted by the platform for discussion. In virtual communities, this is usually software and the bbPress forum has some great features for this. Of course, it also has its faults but I won’t dwell on those. For open source-development though, my all-time favorite is Trac. I spent two hours yesterday tracking down a problem caused by Paul’s post, How do you deliver 100 40GB imagery files? This was the only post causing the bug and I couldn’t for the life of me determine what was different about this post than others. It should have been obvious: the post ends with the word, “files”. Duh!

I eventually determined that a rewrite rule was at fault, and in perusing the versions of .htaccess on Trac, I found a Ticket and fix by orvar, describing exactly the problem that I was having. My thanks you orvar and to the awesome WordPress Mu community.

I’m researching programmatic posting for new WeoGeo data and came across this:

WordPress-on-a-Rope « Shannon Whitley:

WordPress-on-a-Rope provides a soap interface for web service clients. Most of the code has been taken from the XMLRPC interface and modified to work with the PHP soap server.

I noticed some problems on WeoGeo blogs due to MS Word formatting tags. I’ve been looking for a work-around and just learned about Windows Live Writer. It does rich content such as pictures:

hmm… my wp install doesn’t like pix.

Maps:
hmm… not working.

Tags:

del.icio.us tags: blogs blogging RSS

And, lastly, it (a Microsoft product) integrates with Firefox with a Blog This plugin!

I’ve been developing this new version of our blog for some time and it finally went live today. Note the login at the top. This actually logs into the forums and wiki components of the WeoGeo community as well!

The next step is upgrading those two sites. I noticed that there are some dead links in the header and that will be my first task tomorrow morning.

-d

mozdev.org - deepest sender:

Pardon the following massive influx of linked posts but I just installed this extension and I have to try it out:

Deepest Sender is a blogging client that runs inside Firefox, SeaMonkey, and XULRunner. Deepest Sender is a blogging client for Firefox. What does this mean? Well, it means that instead of having to go to the Update page on LiveJournal/WordPress/Blogger/whatever, or loading up a separate client program, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+\, or click the button in your toolbar, and you can start posting. screenshot

Weblog Client « WordPress Codex:

A Weblog Client is software you run on your local machine (desktop) that lets you post to your blog via XML-RPC. In some cases, the Weblog Client can even manage your weblog entries. You might think of Weblog Clients as the equivalent of email clients such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/), and Eudora Mail. Essentially, the Weblog Client allows you to write a post even if you are off-line; then, the next time you connect to the Internet, you can publish that post.