I finally found a use for FeedBurner

Problem: I want VP’s front page to ping the various weblog directories like Technorati and whatnot. Unfortunately, front page posts are post-dated, which means they don’t show up until the date/time passes a predetermined point. If it wasn’t for this, I could just ping the services on article entry.

What I was gonna do: I could have added a flag to each article, and either run a cron job to periodically scan for published articles that haven’t triggered a ping, or have the site code do a ping on the first read of an article. In both cases, I run a risk of over-pinging (I think I got banned from weblogs.com during an earlier incarnation of the code).

Solution: FeedBurner’s PingShot will monitor my feed for new content and automatically ping the services, with little to no effort to me (I may not even have to repoint my main feed). I like things that are little to no effort.

Signed up.

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