Bling

This is the main page for Bling, which is an xmlrpc blog pinger written in groovy.  Once downloaded, you will want to modify it so that the variables "blogTitle", "blogURL", and "sitemapURL" match your blog's, (otherwise you'll just send out tons of pings for a blog named "YOUR_BLOG_TITLE_HERE").  

The intent of this script is to be run once you update your blog--simply run "bling.groovy" from the command line after you've updated your blog and you will then send out pings to a bunch of major services letting them know to crawl your site again.

NEWS:  I've started an online version of Bling running on Google App Engine, if you're interested in the functionality that it provides without having to install groovy and the required modules.  Currently, it operates the same way as the command line version with the exception that there is no debug option.  It is available at http://tools.techstacks.com/bling/.

Command-Line Arguments

As of version 0.6, bling supports command line arguments.  The sole command-line option at this time is a debug option, which outputs the error that was thrown from the xmlrpc endpoint.  Use -d or --debug to display these messages.  

Version History

Clicking on the version number will bring you to the relevant blog post for that release.  The initial version (v0.1) was released on August 12, 2009.  It lacks error and exception handling but it does ping 18 blog directories.

Version 0.2 was released on August 21, 2009. TopicExchange was removed from the list of endpoints that are pinged. In addition, the script now no longer dies when an exception is generated. Finally I removed the responses from the services and instead substitute a generic "Thanks for the Ping!" message on success and a "PING ATTEMPT FAILED" message when an error is thrown by the endpoint. This allowed me to better format the output so it is much more readable now.

Version 0.3 was released on September 9, 2009.  Changes/Additions/Subtractions made to this script:  

  1. Ping-O-Matic has been removed.  Most of the sites ping-o-matic pings are already covered in this script so sending pings out through ping-o-matic was redundant.
  2. Added an additional trap for IOExceptions.  Responses containing items like http status code 500 will no longer cause the script to halt.
  3. Added 5 additional endpoints:  Twingly, WeBlogALot, Spinn3r, PostRank, and WasaLive.  WeBlogALot is on a trial basis and may be removed on the next release because I'm not really sure if this is an active blog directory any longer.  Pings to WeBlogALot usually fail for me.
Version 0.4 was released on October 28, 2009.  Changes/Additions made in this version are as follows:

  1. Added 2 Additional Services:  BlogBuzzMachine and FeedBlitz.  
  2. IceRocket is no longer managed separately since using the same XML-RPC calls that everything else uses also now seems to work for IceRocket.  Right now, the section of the script that contained the separate IceRocket calls has been commented out and will be removed entirely in the net release.
  3. As mentioned above in the version 3.0 section, WeBlogALot has been removed.  In the time since version 3.0 was released, I never got a successful ping.
  4. The spooky and primitive output format utilizing whitespace and tabs has been replaced with padded output.  Thanks again to Mr.Haki for publishing his post about Padding Strings in Groovy.  
  5. Finally, fixed a potential bug in the !response.flerror section, where !response was initially set as !resp in previous versions.

Version 0.4.1 was released on November 7, 2009.  All it does is remove the Technorati ping.

Version 0.5 was released on November 29, 2009.  This version adds sitemap pings to the following search engines: Ask, Bing, Google, Yahoo! and also pings the Moreover sitemap ping service.  In addition to the XMLRPC module for Groovy, this version also requires the module HTTPBuilder.  Both modules are listed in the "Modules" section off of the Groovy language homepage.

Version 0.6 was released on December 22, 2009.  This version removes Feedburner and BlogBuzzMachine.  The new feature in this release is the addition of a debug option [--debug or -d], which, if chosen, will report back the error message thrown from the xmlrpc host.

Download

You can download the current version of Bling from the Downloads page.