B-L-O-G-G-E-R.com

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 6
(read Question 5 here)

TimeStamp and the problem that has been rumored about it - when using a TimeStamp feature your post is actually pinged not when it becomes visible on your blog and published, but once you have saved it and scheduled the for the TimeStamp publishing. This can be a disadvantage, because if over a weekend I scheduled 30 articles for future posting and all they will get pinged today, instead of being pinged day-by-day when they get published on a site. A gap of 30 days without pings!

Is this true?
Do posts with TimeStamp get pinged when they are saved or published on the blog?

It was true. WordPress in the past had a very poor procedure for future pinging - that’s what it’s called - future publishing and future pinging.

And in the past when you would publish something then the ping procedure would get triggered, even if the blog post only shows in the future. Semiologic since the very first version has been addressing this by using future pinging functionality that would replace the default WordPress pinging with a more advanced one that would work properly.

However, we’ve removed all of this since WordPress 2.1, because in WordPress 2.1 they’ve introduced a built in pseudo cron (a cron job is a robot that does something periodically). What this cron job does: it looks for a post status of future. Upon being triggered it sees - ok, there’s a post with status of future and the timestamp is in the past, so let’s switch its status to published and then we’ll switch the pinging procedure.

So, nowadays pinging in WordPress only occurs when the post actually gets published.

I have also heard that quite the same can happen when using "Save and Continue Editing" button. The story is like this - when you click it, the blog draft is saved and this draft can send a ping signal.

That is why when working with text and clicking "Save and Continue Editing" button several times - and this is rumored to cause ping spam. Is it true or not?

No, it’s not true. And it’s not true for the very same reason. The ping procedure nowadays only gets triggered at the moment when the post status switched from anything to published. And that’s when the pinging occurs.

When you click "Save and Continue", "Save and Continue", "Save and Continue" - then it will not ping. It only pings when the status becomes published.

Which also means that when you have something which is published already and you edit it, it will not ping either, because the post status is not changed.

Read Question 7 about Automatic Social Bookmarking Solutions and Blogging.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Denis Bernardy - Semiologic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.