Make WordPress ping only when a new post really goes live

I timestamp most of my WordPress posts. The other day, I came across a recent conversation about how WordPress pings the services when you hit “publish”, not when the post goes live. This is not good; you can read more about it there.

Further research suggests this problem has been cleared up by version 2.3, and yet no one in the WordPress forums can get a straight confirmation. In any case, there’s no question WordPress re-pings every time you edit a post, which is why your feedreader occasionally spits up 10 or 12 old posts from a blog you read. This, too, is not good.

I chased down a number of plugins that were supposed to fix part or all of the problem, only to find they’d all stopped working. I gave up and decided to go with Feedburner’s Pingshot service, which would solve the future posting problem (if it still exists) but not the editing re-ping issue.

Then I gave it one more go and found the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizing plugin. I tried it on three blogs, and deliberately left it off a couple of others that do time-stamped posts. Instantly, the traffic on the three blogs I used it on increased a bit. Visitors started commenting almost immediately after posts went up, which hadn’t been happening before. Feeds started updating better in my feedreaders.

The plugin does do one funky thing: while you’re typing a draft in the admin screen, it spits out errors down below the post box every time WordPress attempts to save a draft of the article. I can’t see that this is a problem, however, and it’s not even annoying. I’ve been using the plugin for about a week now and I think it’s well-worth it. Whoops! My mistake: you want to upload the folder with the plugin inside, not just the plugin file to your plugins directory.

In the interests of disclosure, yes, the link to the plugin is an affiliate link. Yes, I would have blogged about it anyway because I think it’s really made a difference. Yes, the plugin is free (I only get paid if you buy another product from him).

Subscribe to feed updates or email updates
Email Post | Print This
Posted on November 16, 2007