Problem when sending pings to Technorati

[marcusfriedman]

Since I enabled the Announce Entries plugin, I was never able to ping Technorati. Has anyone had the same problem? Here's the error message that shows up when a new entry is saved:

Sending XML-RPC ping to host rpc.technorati.com...Failure(Reason: Invalid return payload: enable debugging to examine incoming payload)

I've already set $debug = 1 in bundled-libs/XML/RPC.php , but I'm no sure where I should look for a more verbose description of the problem.

All the other pings that I send seem to be working fine (Yahoo, Google, Twingly, etc).

Any ideas...?

[judebert]

That file has at least two places where you can define $debug. I don't think either of them is going to help much, though. The error message seems to want you to enable debugging at Technorati to see the problem.

There's also a sort of debugging capability in the ping plugin itself. Edit your plugins/serendipity_event_weblogping/serendipity_event_weblogping.php, and add this line right after the <?php:

Code: Select all

@define('SERENDIPITY_XMLRPC_VERBOSE', true);

Then you should get a printout for each ping. You can compare them to find out why Technorati isn't working for you.

[marcusfriedman]

Hi, thanks a lot for that tip! I hadn't notice that $debug was defined in more than one place, and it looks like I had enabled it at the wrong one. After enabling $debug at the right place, I published another post and these are the results that I got after the pings were sent:

Code: Select all

Sending XML-RPC ping to host blogsearch.google.com... 
---GOT---
<?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>
  </struct></value></param>
</params></methodResponse>

---END---
---PARSED---
object(XML_RPC_Value)#56 (2) {
  ["me"]=>
  array(1) {
    ["struct"]=>
    array(2) {
      ["flerror"]=>
      object(XML_RPC_Value)#65 (2) {
        ["me"]=>
        array(1) {
          ["boolean"]=>
          int(0)
        }
        ["mytype"]=>
        int(1)
      }
      ["message"]=>
      object(XML_RPC_Value)#61 (2) {
        ["me"]=>
        array(1) {
          ["string"]=>
          string(20) "Thanks for the ping."
        }
        ["mytype"]=>
        int(1)
      }
    }
  }
  ["mytype"]=>
  int(3)
}
---END---
Success!!
Sending XML-RPC ping to host rpc.technorati.com... 
---GOT---

---END---
Failure(Reason: Invalid return payload: enable debugging to examine incoming payload)

Then I checked the ping specification at Technorati, and I noticed that it doesn't support extended pings (which I had enabled). So I configured the Announce Entries pluging for sending standard pings to Technorati. Unfortunately, I got the same results. It looks like Technorati is not responding at all.

As I wasn't able to get any useful debugging information, I decided to try pinging manually by telnetting to rpc.technorati.com on port 80 and sending a ping request. This worked without any problems. However, when I tried the same from a shell account at my hosting provider, I found that Technorati closes the connection immediately after receiving the XML data (without any replies or error messages).

So it seems that for some reason Technorati isn't accepting ping requests coming from the public IPs assigned to my hosting provider

[judebert]

Hmmm. I wonder who your provided ticked off?

I believe you may be hitting a firewall or proxy issue. I'd ask my provider to allow connections from my website to Technorati port 80 and see what they said.