I’m happy to say that our Planet Journals aggregator now pings successfully; previously when a ping was received the aggregator would begin immediately in the foreground and would thereby be delayed in sending a successful notification to proxies or blog platforms until aggregation was complete. Now the aggregation is performed in the background, and you’ll see the results almost instantly on planet.journals.ie. Thanks to Keith Gaughan for pointing out the problem, and to Martin Feeney for explaining the solution; it was then a simple matter of implementing it!

You can just add http://planet.journals.ie/xml-rpc.php to your list of ping servers in your blogging platform (e.g. in WordPress, it’s under Options > Writing > Update Services). Alternatively, if your blog system doesn’t support pinging (e.g. Blogger), you can use Keith Gaughan’s Irish Ping Proxy.