ping THIS.

Few things on this planet can make me say "huh?" faster than code. However, as I've discovered, if I sit in my chair and only say "huh?" or "bwah?" only after testing out some new snippet of code, I eventually manage to turn "huh?" into "aha!"

See, for all you folks out there who are using a CMS that someone else wrote for you, chances are good that figuring out how to do XMLish pings for places like weblogs.com, wander-lust, and blo.gs could be best described as going to some publicity menu or other and just clicking "do this ping, baby!"For those of us who are currently the one-woman band of developers, beta testers, and code-breakers, it's several hours' worth of "huh?" followed by many many iterations of "well, maybe this change will work..." and hopefully, eventually, by an "AHA!"

...which is immediately followed by giggling madly, running around the room, and throwing handsigns at the computer (which is remarkably uninterested in your handsigns). For good measure, such rapturous silliness is usually also followed by apologizing to the cat for awakening him from his on-desk nap.

Right. So. Time to take a breath. The worst is over. It wasn't just a matter of setting up a ping. First, I had to streamline my code in the add/edit entry page, because it was rapidly spiraling out of control. No point adding any more code until I could manage the code I'd already written.

I needed a new table in the database, which necessitated minor changes in two other tables. That meant changes to the install script. After that, Quarto needed a page to actually edit the pings. Then, one at a time, the addition and testing of the pings (of which this entry is the first such on cat.net).

Assuming all goes well, this will put me at twelve of sixteen - enough that, even in my book, it would be time to close to book on coding for the night, scratch the cat, and head into the living room for a date with a late-night TV show.

Oh yeah, and Girl Scout cookies. That, my friends, is a definite reward for a day of successful coding.

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Comments

hrm. weblogs.com worked, as did wander-lust. blo.gs didn't, though. Will have to investigate why. Mmmm, cookies.

Ohhh...pinging is cool. Trackback wouldn't happen to be on that list of things to work on would it Amy? ;)

Amy: any reason why the dc.net blurb on wondergeeks.net is different from the story text? Was that done on purpose?

Chris - The two big wishes I have left (aside from world peace, feline peace, no more frizzy hair and a lovely, snowy holiday) are for either trackback/pingback and allowing registered users to subscribe to comments. But, as we all know, this sort of thing is totally dependent on my ability to figure the damn thing out, so keep your fingers crossed. I suspect comment subscription will be FAR easier than ping/track-back. Brian aka siliconchef: Yep, that's totally on purpose. When you log in to geek-chick you'll notice that there's an optional section marked 'blurb.' Normally, for wondergeek syndication / RSS syndication / random entry pulling / etc., the first X words are pulled. If the first X words just don't do it for you, you can supply a blurb and the blurb will get used in its place.

Amy: I know your busy and from looking into it Trackback doesn't look to be that easy of a thing to impliment. So I was just kinda saying it for the hell of it. What do you mean though about subscribing to comments? Like when a new comment is posted t user will get an email about it?

It's 6 in the morning.... This is like, or at least, sharing to some degree - one of the forgottennumber of wierd sites it has been my scary friends fortune to stumble ov.. ouch..er. In this short T.L.A. I shall express all -: WTF?

That comment had all the appearance of English and yet none of the meaning. Any of the regular readers care to take a stab at translation?

I will, This moron stumbled upon this site, and tried to leave a comment. I believe if my "Idiot to English" dictionary is correct, courtesy of www.illwillpress.com, Foamy's Rant II, he tried to say: "I've been to a lot of weird sites, and this is, or ties for, the weirdest of them all" He's a moron, but whatever. I like this site.

Puerile.

Dear Ricky It suprises me that someone who bandies the term 'Moron' freely, still needs to cross reference an on-line help site for 'Idiot-speak'. Then again some of us are slow learners. The clue to a proper translation lay, perhaps a tad too sublimely, in the first sentence. Maybe I should have added two very large bottles of Vodka and no sleep in 2 days to the somewhat breif "6am", then perchance you may have forgiven my somewhat 'strange' message? But I never and you didn't. It must be a whole barrel of fun for a newbie with a limited grasp of English on this site? btw - Negate last sentence to reveal it's intended meaning, I was being sarcastic. There, now nobody has to surf anywhere to understand what I meant then, now do they?

The satire for this stuff writes itself. As to pinging ... Amy, you should look into having Quarto ping Ping-O-Matic. One XML-RPC ping and it repeats for you. Spifftacular.