Pingr - Tell search engines about your sitemap changes

Pingr is a super-simple gem built for the blogit project.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'pingr'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install pingr

Usage

From within your app (most likely a controller):

def ping_sitemaps
  Pingr::Request.new(:google, my_sitemap_url).ping
end

A good way to do this would be using Rails's after filters:

class PostsController < ActionController::Base

  after_filter :ping_sitemaps, only: [:create, :update, :destroy]

  # ... 

  private

  def ping_sitemaps
    Pingr::Request.new(:google, my_sitemap_url).ping
    Pingr::Request.new(:bing, my_sitemap_url).ping
  end

end

You can ping all supported search engines by doing:

def ping_sitemaps
  for search_engine in Pingr::SUPPORTED_SEARCH_ENGINES
    Pingr::Request.new(search_engine, my_sitemap_url).ping
  end
end

... not the most elegant solution but we'll improve that in future versions.

Modes

By default, Pingr is set to :test mode, meaning it won't actually perform the requests. If the Rails environment is :production then the mode is set to :live which will perform requests to the search engines.

You can change this by manually setting Pingr.mode

# in config/initializers/pingr.rb
Pingr.mode = :live if Rails.env =~ /staging|production/

NOTE: Search engines may penalise or black-list you if you perform too many requests - they recommend no more than one per hour.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

About Katana Code

Katana Code are iPhone app and Ruby on Rails Developers in Edinburgh, Scotland.