There's a site called weblogs.com run by Dave Winer of scripting.com fame. This site exists to let people keep track of when their favorite weblogs have updated their content.

A weblog is sort of like this site, but usually updated more often, and usually more interesting. To the person that writes the weblog, at least.

The old way to tell weblogs.com that you've updated your site was to do nothing. It would check your site every hour and if it thought it had changed, it would mark your site as updated in the big list. This was always crude compared to having it check an RSS feed, which Dave Winer has also been involved with heavily. But strangely, it didn't work that way.

If you have a site like mine that's nearly always got a change due to the random cool thing, the old weblogs.com thought you updated it every hour. If only I had that much to say...

Anyway, the new way is to send a SOAP or XML-RPC message to weblogs.com, effectively saying, "Hey, I just updated my site."

So now, if you want your site to be included on the list, you need to:

• Use some software that can send a message to weblogs.com already. Funny how there are lots of web site management systems now quickly adding something like this, and nearly every one of them calls their implementation of it a "hack."
• Get a library that can do it for you. Not that it's all that hard.
• Roll your own. I did this with XML-RPC, using seven lines of Perl and SOAP::Lite. Could be four if I didn't want legibility, three if I ran the show on my Perl install, and two if I didn't care about the reply from weblogs.com.
• Fill out a form. Better yet, bookmark the filled-out form.

The thing is, this is a trival thing to do. There's no reason to use a big interface spec like SOAP to do this. In fact, here's an example of how to do it in one line of PHP.

Notice that this little one-liner doesn't even use XML-RPC; it's the bookmarked form version. For this task, it seems pretty clear that XML-RPC and SOAP are an answer in search of a problem.

If you really want to harness the raw power of XML-RPC, there's always my random cool thing service...