Stratus3D

A blog on software engineering by Trevor Brown

Octopress Rake Task for Notifying Search Engines

I recently have been trying to automate many of the smaller tasks that I need to perform when publishing a blog post. One those tasks is submitting my new sitemap to the various search engines and blogging services. Right now I either do it manually or wait until the search engines crawl my site again.

I quickly found several rake tasks that can automate submitting my sitemap. While the code for the Rake tasks did work I saw some things that needed to be improved, so I set about refactoring them. I was able to come up with a nice set of well behaved Rake tasks for each of the services I wanted to notify of my new content. I now have Rake tasks for Google, Bing, and Ping-o-Matic.

Each Rake task makes a request to the service’s API then checks the status code in the response. If it’s successful it prints a success message, otherwise it prints an error message along with the response body and fails the Rake task. This ensures the Rake tasks will always print an error and then crash when a submission fails, so there will never be any false positives. The complete set of Rake tasks is shown below.

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'cgi'
require 'xmlrpc/client'

desc 'Ping pingomatic'
task :pingomatic do
  cfg = YAML.load_file("_config.yml")
  rss_url = "#{cfg['url']}#{cfg['subscribe_rss']}"
  puts '* Pinging ping-o-matic'
  response = XMLRPC::Client.new('rpc.pingomatic.com', '/').call('weblogUpdates.extendedPing', "#{cfg['title']}" , "#{cfg['url']}", rss_url)
  puts response["message"]
  if response["flerror"] == true
    puts "Ping-o-Matic error: #{response}"
    fail
  else
    puts "Successfully RSS feed to Ping-o-Matic"
  end
end

desc 'Notify Google of the new sitemap'
task :sitemapgoogle do
  cfg = YAML.load_file("_config.yml")
  puts '* Pinging Google about our sitemap'
  response = Net::HTTP.get_response('www.google.com', '/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=' + URI.escape("#{cfg['url']}/sitemap.xml"))
  if response.code == "200"
    puts "Successfully submitted sitemap to Google"
  else
    puts "Google Sitemap response: #{response.body}"
    fail
  end
end

desc 'Notify Bing of the new sitemap'
task :sitemapbing do
  cfg = YAML.load_file("_config.yml")
  puts '* Pinging Bing about our sitemap'
  response = Net::HTTP.get_response('www.bing.com', '/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=' + URI.escape("#{cfg['url']}/sitemap.xml"))
  if response.code == "200"
    puts "Successfully submitted sitemap to Bing"
  else
    puts "Bing Sitemap response: #{response.body}"
    fail
  end
end

desc 'Notify pubsubhubbub server.'
task :pingpubsubhubbub do
  cfg = YAML.load_file("_config.yml")
  data = 'hub.mode=publish&hub.url=' + CGI::escape("#{cfg['url']}#{cfg['subscribe_rss']}")
  headers = {'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}
  puts '* Pinging pubsubhubbub server'
  request = Net::HTTP.new('pubsubhubbub.appspot.com', 80)
  response = request.post('http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/publish', data, headers)
  if response.code == "200" || response.code == "204"
    puts "Successfully submitted sitemap to pubsubhubbub"
  else
    puts "pubsubhubbub response: #{response.body}"
    fail
  end
end

desc 'Notify all the services about new content'
task :notify => [:pingomatic, :sitemapgoogle, :sitemapbing, :pingpubsubhubbub] do
end

desc "Generate website, deploy, and notify web services of changes"
task :gen_deploy_notify => [:gen_deploy, :notify] do
end

For each of these we check the status code in the HTTP response and then either print the success message, or an error message containing the actual response.

References