Ping Your Weblogs With Excel

I like tools like PingOmatic because I manage some rss feeds that don’t automatically ping web services when I update. So I go there and they do it for me.

The problem with relying on someone else however is when their site is down I can’t send pings, or when my cookies are cleared I need to enter all my input again. (For instance, when I went to link to Pingomatic for this post I got this screen).

I’ve meant to code pinging my rss feeds with PHP, but after exploring sending XML with XmlHTTP I thought it could be done pretty easily with Excel, and it was.

So for the past week or so I’ve been using Excel to ping weblog services like Technorati and Weblogs.com and things seem to be working pretty smoothly.

I simply enter my Blog Name and URL then hit PING! and it will ping the 11 webservices I have chosen. Here’s a picture of the results I get:

I’ll jot down a couple notes in a second, but first here is the download:

Notice: You need Excel 2003 for this spreadsheet to work because of the Version of the XML parser I use. The code is not password protected (as always), so if anybody wants to modify this and post a version that works with earlier versions of excel I’ll post a link to it here. Enjoy.

Download Ping Your Weblog With Excel

Note 1: This can be easily modified to ping multiple rss feeds with a loop or two (which I plan to do).

Note 2: Nothing against Pingomatic, I love the service, just wanted to do it myself.

Note 3: This is also an example of a basic XML-RPC client in Excel. Possibly I’ll post more on this later. What else can I do with this technology?

Note 4: This is the first spreadsheet I’m including a link to the newly created support page. People can’t support your work if you don’t give them a way to I guess. It’s also a small text link so those that aren’t interested can easily ignore or delete it.