November 15, 2003

Dealing with duplicate pings

Christian Crumlish

Weblogs often generate multiple trackback pings to the same entry. This is usually because a timeout in the initial ping caused the process to fail to acknowledge, so the sending weblog tries again next time the user updates the entry.

To avoid sending out duplicate pings, if you get an error after posting, go to the recipient blog and verify whether the ping made it or not. If it didn't, try republishing the entry (MT will keep the ping URL handy until it knows it has worked). If it did, manually remove the ping URL from the box on the entry page in MT, so that it won't be sent again if the entry is ever rebuilt.

As for incoming pings, that's trickier. The main MT page lists the most recent 5 pings, but the items link out to the incoming post, so there's no clue about which local entry was the recipient of the ping. For example, on the RFB main page right now, there are two incoming pings that are actually from RFB (filchy's "Is linking like sex" entry). It was duplicated when he changes the capitalization of the entry and republished. It would have come through again, too, as the ping URL was still there in the box. (I removed it, but then later wished I had tracked it down.)

The thing is, I can't tell which local entries those pings go to. Examining flichyboy's posts, I can't find any links to RFB entries, so it appears to be a manually added trackback. If I could find the recipient entry, I would manually delete the first ping and keep the second one (Which has the correct capitalization.)

By the way, sometimes you ping somebody and then notice a typo that is now memorialized on the pinged blog. In those cases, if it matters, I notify the person, fix the typo and reping them, and ask them to manually delete the incorrect one.

Posted by xian at November 15, 2003 12:55 PM
Other incoming links (via Technorati)

Hosted by Mediajunkie.

Sponsors
On this day in 2005
Blogging from New Orleans: My friends Steve and Elizabeth are blogging the reconstruction of New Orleans from within the city: Inside the Bowl. We stay with them when we go to Jazz Fest (nearly every year), and we were very worried about them when the flood and hurricane hit. They evacuated successfully and their house... (Storytelling)
On this day in 2002
bIPlog goes live: The weblog of the Berkeley journalism school Intellectual Property class, bIPlog went live today. It's a group weblog. The focus of the class is on intellectual property. The weblog is merely one form of expression for the journalistic efforts of the class in covering the "beat" of intellectual property in these... (Weblog Concepts)
Xtra! Xtra! Read all about it...: [Andrew Bayer]So I'm scrolling down the Salon main page (just renewed my Premium subscription - and why haven't you? Hmmm...?) when I see something a little different: Salon Blogs Scott Rosenberg Wall Street Journal's $200,000-a-year spammerPlus: "Xtreme" blogging! [The Raven] Start your own blog | Recently updated blogs Ain't that something... (Salon Bloggers)
Independent journalist blogging his way back to Iraq: Former AP and New York Daily News reporter Christopher Allbritton publishes the Back to Iraq blog, through which he is attempting to raise money to send himself back to northern Iraq. Here's part of his pitch soliciting support for his independent journalistic mission: This summer I went stumbling around Iraqi Kurdistan,... (Weblog Concepts)
ASPEN MAGAZINE interpreted for the Web: Small world department, my cousin A.P. Crumlish, who runs bend of bay, forwards me this Ubuweb announcement about Andrew Stafford's adaptation of ASPEN MAGAZINE for the Web. Readers of this space will recall that Stafford is also responsible for the brilliant Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp.... [artsflow]... (Memes)
'Coffeehouse' reviewed five years down the road: Wred Fright at Babel Magazine writes a round up of books derived from online e-zine publishing in From A to Zine, but finds most of the content of Coffeehouse unremarkable.... [artsflow]... (Miscellany)