So, Technorati recommended a Nucleus plugin called PingPong to automatically ping them when you post new blog entries. I installed it, but it's not clear whether it's actually working or not.

So I've tweaked it a bit. I've added a new option to enable logging to the action log. If you set it to yes, it will log each ping attempt, including the fault code and message if it fails. I've also added support for the default Weblogs.com service which is included in Nucleus, but you (apparently) have to disable with the PingPong plugin.

All being well, this now works properly. I can't say I've done an elegant job, and I'm sure there's room for improvement*, but it does what I wanted it to do now. If anyone is interested, I'll post the code somewhere - just leave a comment.

* Actually, I wanted to log the blog title, but couldn't work out how to do it. Learning PHP programming and much more about Nucleus would probably help on that front...