Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2003-11-4

The things you can spell with domain names ...

Hmm ...

    ".co.ck": is used for business organisations. Companies must register their corporate name or trading name, or some form of abbreviation. For example, Telecom Cook Islands Ltd. has registered "telecom.co.ck" as their domain name.

I was hoping to be able to get ha.ck, but the Cook Islands NIC doesn't allow second-level domain registration. (... and non-residents are charged US$150 instead of NZ$35 per annum!)

blo.gs weblogUpdates syndication

Hey, this rocks. blo.gs has a feature whereby you can get it to ping you when it gets a ping. You tell it about your server with an XML-RPC call, and it'll then notify you when anybody updates, either by calling an XML-RPC method or POSTing some data to a page on your site.

In Python, you can get it to call you with XML-RPC (calling the function weblogUpdates.cloudPing) like this:

#!/usr/local/bin/python

import xmlrpclib
print xmlrpclib.Server('http://ping.blo.gs/').weblogUpdates.registerCloud(
    'http://my.server.com/RPC2',
    'xml-rpc',
    'weblogUpdates.cloudPing',
    'my random token',
    )


(Replace my.server.com with your server name and my random token with some text of your choice).

This code will print out a number. That's the number of hours (25 for me) for which it'll retain your server details. After that (well, before that) you have to call it again if you want to stay connected.

So, anyway, I had just made the Topic Exchange support the Weblogs.Com API so you could put http://topicexchange.com/RPC2 in your Movable Type ping list and connect to it directly, but then I found out about this blo.gs cloud thing, so you don't need to ping the Topic Exchange -- just ping blo.gs and the ITE will hear about it a few seconds later. Nice!

What this means is that the Topic Exchange now has a nice little weblog updates page. It's showing 1694 pings right now - wow.
... more like this: [, , ] ... topic exchange: []