Example XML-RPC Request:

Example Extended Ping XML-RPC Request with multiple category tags:

Example XML-RPC Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Length: 333
Content-Type: text/xml
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 20:02:30 GMT
Server: Apache
<?xml version="1.0"?>
 <methodResponse>

  <params>
   <param>
    <value>
     <struct>
      <member>
       <name>flerror</name>
       <value>
        <boolean>0</boolean>
       </value>
      </member>
      <member>
       <name>message</name>
       <value>Thanks for the ping.</value>
      </member>
      <member>
       <name>legal</name>
       <value>You agree that use of the Weblogs.com ping service is governed by the Terms of Use found at www.weblogs.com.</value>
      </member>
     </struct>
    </value>
   </param>
  </params>
</methodResponse>

Setting up a REST Client

URL:  http://rpc.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm

Parameters:

Example HTTP GET request:

Processing Model, Error Responses, and Rejected Pings

Both the REST and XML-RPC interfaces are synchronous and will attempt to ensure that your client submitted a valid ping. Examples of invalid pings include, but are not limited to:

• Your ping is missing a required parameter;
• Your ping contains a parameter that exceeded its length limitation;
• Your ping contains a URL parameter that does not start with "http://";
• Your ping contains a URL parameter that refers to a known invalid host;
• Your XML-RPC request contains an ENTITY reference.

The core Weblogs.com ping processing service is based upon an asynchronous model. This means that even though your client receives an initial "Thanks for the ping" synchronous response, your ping may be dropped or filtered later for various reasons (not limited to the following):

• Your ping client may be pinging too fast (more than one ping per 30 minute interval);
• Your ping may refer to a blog host that has requested to be removed from this service.

Published Weblog Lists: changes.xml and shortChanges.xml

Every five minutes, Weblogs.com publishes two documents:

1. changes.xml contains the latest 60 minutes of pinged weblogs. Applications should not read this file more often than once per hour.
2. shortChanges.xml contains the top 5 minutes of changes.xml. The top 100 of these sites are shown at Weblogs.com.

In addition, once per hour Weblogs.com publishes the previous hours worth of pinged weblogs as XML and HTML documents. For example, you can find the list of Weblogs that were pinged during the 05 GMT hour of 18 October 2005 under www.weblogs.com/2005/10/18/05.xml.

Weblogs.com supports HTTP request and response headers like "If-Modified-Since" and ETag to help you save bandwidth by only downloading the changes files that you haven't already seen.

Both changes.xml and shortChanges.xml conform to the following XML document structure:

<weblogUpdates version="2" updated="Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:10:00 GMT" count="1384779">
    <weblog name="Weblogs.com" url="http://www.weblogs.com" when="1"/>

    <weblog name="My Blog site" url="http://www.myblogsite.com" when="2"/>
    <weblog name="Another site" url="http://www.anothersite.com" when="3"/>
</weblogUpdates>

The www.weblogs.com/rssUpdates service produces changes.xml and shortChanges.xml that conform to the following XML document structure:

<weblogUpdates version="2" updated="Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:10:00 GMT" count="1384779">

    <weblog name="Weblogs.com" url="http://www.weblogs.com" 
               rssUrl="http://www.weblogs.com/rss.xml" when="1"/>
    <weblog name="My Blog site" url="http://www.myblogsite.com"  
               rssUrl="http://www.myblogsite.com/rdf.xml" when="2"/>
    <weblog name="Another site" url="http://www.anothersite.com"  
               rssUrl="http://www.anothersite.com/atom.xml" when="3"/>
</weblogUpdates>

The <weblogUpdates> Element

changes.xml and shortChanges.xml contain a single weblogUpdates element. It has three attributes: version, updated and count; and any number of weblog sub-elements.

1. version is a number; we're currently on version number 2. However if the format changes substantially, we have an easy way to support this version in addition to the new one.
2. updated is a string, a date-time in HTTP 1.0 format, it indicates when changes.xml was last updated.
3. count is a number, it indicates how many times changes.xml has been updated since its deployment.
4. Note that weblogUpdates is sorted in reverse-chronologic order.

The <weblog> Element

weblog has three attributes: name, url and when:

1. name is a string, the name of a weblog.
2. url is a string, its URL.
3. rssUrl is a string, the URL of an RSS, RDF, or Atom feed for the weblog.
4. when is a number of seconds. If you subtract this number from the updated attribute of weblogUpdates, you'll get the time that Weblogs.com was pinged with that weblog.