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Any RSS/ping experts able to answer this question?

by MrYossu
2 replies
Hello,

This is a bit of a technical question about pinging RSS feeds. Hopefully someone here will be able to shed some light on it.

I have seen IM people advocate creating RSS feeds for backlink/bookmark pages using sites like html2rss.com and then using pingomatic.com or pingoat.com to ping them.

Looking at these last two sites, they explicitly say on the form that you should enter the home page of your blog. Now if you use (say) html2rss.com to produce a feed for a profile page, the URL of that feed is something like www.html2rss.com/view/someusername-123456/ which is NOT a home page. (by the way, I just made up that URL, so if it points to a real feed, it's nothing to do with me!)

Any idea if pinging this URL will actually do anything for your profile page at all? The two pinging sites just send on the request to the various ping directories, but from what I've read (quite a bit just recently), I would expect those directories to do one of two things...

1) ignore the request completely as it's not a home page, or

2) strip off the non-root parts of the URL, which means you're basically pinging html2rss.com's home page, which will not do anything at all for your own feed.

Any thoughts on this? The reason I ask is that I've been doing a lot of research on the technical side of pinging, as I am writing an application that will include a pinging facility. The technical specs for XML-RPC (which is what is behind all this pinging stuff) all seem to require a home page/root URL, not an individual page. If you try to ping an individual page, most places seem to reject the ping.

Thanks for any comments,
alan
#answer #experts #question #rss or ping
  • Profile picture of the author stma
    What the directory is looking for is "auto discovery" of the sites rss feed. Google it - and put the code on your home page so when the rss directory goes there it "finds" your rss2html feed.

    Should work although you might have to pick up a few .info domains so it isn't a crazy experiment.
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  • Profile picture of the author MrYossu
    Hello,

    Sorry, taken me ages to find time to respond to this. I looked up auto discovery, and I was already doing it without knowing the name.

    I tried again, and got more specific info. Maybe you can make sense of this. I picked a feed at random from http://www.html2rss.com for testing. The web page for the feed in question was http://www.html2rss.com/view/ezsolution-579699/ and the URL for the RSS feed was http://www.html2rss.com/ezsolution.rss.

    I tried pinging feedburner with this feed, using both URLs, but in both cases I got the error...

    "We were unable to process your ping. You must ping with a URL that exactly matches the channel link (RSS) or alternate link (Atom) in your top level feed element pointing back to your website (e.g http://myblog.blogspot.com/), or use your feed URL (e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/myuri)."

    If I ping http://rpc.pingomatic.com/RPC2 with either of the two URLs, I just get a blank response, so I have no idea if the ping worked.

    Any idea what this means and why I get it?

    Thanks again,
    Alan
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