Future posts vs pings and trackbacks

[Mekk]

Serendipity allows me to create post with the future date. Sweet, this way I can - for example - prepare 3 posts in advance, and have them posted one by one every morning, while being out of the net.

But .... as I just spotted, when I saved such a post, both pings and trackbacks were issued. This does not make sense, the article is not yet accessible!

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Yes, the problem of future posts is that s9y cannot easily execute something that happens when the article gets live -- the SQL query sometimes simply handles the SQL date threshold and shows that article; executing a trackback is not meant at that place.

I believed that future posts would not issue a trackback at all, but if you say it currently executes the trackback, that indeed does not make sense.

I'll see how code can be changed to prevent this, thanks for the heads-up.

Regards,
Garvin

[Mekk]

It is reasonable not to issue a trackback/ping at all in such a case. I'd force it manually, say by making dummy edit.

Even better, if one could show some flags ("notificatons up to date" or so) on the entries list. Or pick some function to check for that. Or ....

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I just commited a patch so that trackbacks will not be sent to entries published in the future.

Even better, if one could show some flags ("notificatons up to date" or so) on the entries list. Or pick some function to check for that. Or ....

This would be nice, but would require enhancing the database table structure, so this is a larger task.

Regards,
Garvin

[marcusfriedman]

Hi Garvin!

I was wondering about the future posts/trackbacks issue, when I foud Mekk's post.

I was running s9y 1.3.1 until now, but having seen that you commited that patch on August, I decided to upgrade to 1.4.1.

The upgrade worked flawlessly, but I'm still unsure about how trackbacks work with regard to posts with future dates. When are the trackbacks triggered in those cases? Should I save the future posts again after they go live to make that happen?


Thanks,
Marcus

[onli]

>Should I save the future posts again after they go live to make that happen?
Yes. This will toggles the trackback-generation.
sincerely

[marcusfriedman]

I've just saved a new entry with a future date (an article that should go live tomorrow), and not only a new sitemap was submitted (which I guess is wrong, since the blog hasn't changed yet) but also pings were sent.

Code: Select all

Sent sitemap sitemap to www.google.com.
Sent sitemap sitemap to submissions.ask.com.
You can also add it to your robots.txt, see here for details.
Sending XML-RPC ping to host rpc.pingomatic.com...Success!!
Sending XML-RPC ping to host ping.blo.gs...Failure(Reason: Invalid return payload: enable debugging to examine incoming payload)
Sending XML-RPC ping to host rpc.blogrolling.com...Success!!
Sending XML-RPC ping to host rpc.weblogs.com...Success!!
Sending XML-RPC ping to host api.my.yahoo.com...Success!!
Sending XML-RPC ping to host blogsearch.google.com...Success!!
Sending XML-RPC ping to host rpc.technorati.com...Failure(Reason: Invalid return payload: enable debugging to examine incoming payload)
Sending XML-RPC ping to host rpc.twingly.com...Success!!

I still don't understand how this is supposed to work in s9y 1.4.1. I thought that sitemaps/pings/trackbacks would only be sent if I saved an entry after its publishing date.

Am I missing something? In the case of pings, should I set the announce entries' options to "None" before saving future posts?

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Trackbacks and XML-RPC pings are something different; they always execute. But this is no problem, as the pings and sitemaps only include currently available entries. So when their spiders reindex your site, that's no problem.

Regards,
Garvin

[marcusfriedman]

Garvin, thank you for you explanation. I can see now that there's no problem at all in submitting a new sitemap, even when there aren't new contents published.

However, what happens with blog pings?

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated

So what I still don't understand is this: why are pings sent when I save (publish) an entry with a future date? Isn't the ping telling the server that there are new contents available? But if the post is dated on the future, there are no new contents by the time the post is saved.

In your previous post you mentioned that pings only include currently available entries. From what I can see, the payload sent to the server only includes the blog title, the blog URL and in the case of extended pings it also includes the URL for the blog feed. So the remote server receives the ping, and then checks the blog URL (or its feed) looking for new contents, but it won't find any.

I apologize if I'm getting this all wrong. I'm not very familiar with the way blog pings work (except for having read this specification published by Weblogs.com). Anyway, I'm willing to learn in order to use pings properly.


Thanks again!,
Marcus

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Well, the ping only tells the service to look at the page again and check for new content. It's not really a problem when there's nothing new on the page, the robots simply update their content to the new one, even if there are no new articles.

The ping would in this case not need to be sent, but this would mean that the plugin code needs updating to check for this special future-publish case. since the effectws of this are ignorable, working on this issue appears to me like a lost cause, and I can't really currently find the time to update the plugin. If someone wants to do that, I can happily include the patch.

HTH,
Garvin

[marcusfriedman]

Garvin, thank you very much for your answer. It's more than clear now

I've been thinking about this issue, and I believe that you're right when you say that pinging before having new contents available has a minimum impact.

After all, every time you save a new future post, s9y will send a ping, so the remote servers will check your blog and find your previous future post (which probably by that time will be already available for indexing).