I’ve been working on a ping service comparable to Ping-o-Matic, with the goal of providing a much faster response time for users. I’m at the point where I need an initial batch of users to try it out and provide feedback before it goes completely public. If you are interested then drop me a note using my contact form and I’ll point you to the website.
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4 replies on “New Ping Service Testers Needed”
If the main difference in your system is just “being faster” I would suggest you work with the PoM project instead of against it. We are currently handling over 40 requests per second, have over 14 million blogs in the db, and a blacklist of hundreds of thousands of domains and IPs. We’re also working closely with upstream providers to stop spam, unfortunately many of the new services cropping up are just functioning as open relays for ping junk. Ping-O-Matic is also going to be much faster once we bring the partner mirrors online.
Great work, Joseph! The response time is excellent, and I can easily live with a few minutes of delay between posting and getting the services notified. (Beats the crap out of waiting 30-60 seconds after posting, waiting for interactive services to notify everybody while I sit watching the Firefox spinner…)
Do you mind if I put something on my site about this? (I will leave the service URL out of the post, so you can keep tabs on the testers.)
[…] Joseph started discussing these problems with me the other day, and the delays I’ve sometimes noticed upon clicking the Publish button came to mind. Turns out that he had an idea for a streamlined notification service, which he’s now opened up for testing. I’ve installed the new service in place of PoM, and it seems to be a significant improvement. [link] […]
[…] Those are some interesting points to ponder. Point #1 is particularly troublesome, so let’s think about points 2-5 first. It seems to me that we’d do well to look at some other services for ideas and inspiration. The first one that comes to my mind is DNS. No ads on DNS, and not many fees are being charged for it. Perhaps we should come up with some sort of distributed model for handling blog pings? If we have a distributed service, no single server would have to bear the entire load, and we can probably avoid the traffic cost and scaling issues. But now about point #5 — Obviously pings need to be acknowledged very quickly, but do pings need to be delivered fast? Joseph’s ping service is based on a queueing model, which seems reasonable and more practical to me. What do I care if my posts are advertised “immediately” or I have to wait 5 minutes? […]