Back to the drawing board on category feeds

Few days back I moved to providing categorized feed for JavaBlogs and Artima. However I realized two big problems with this approach which questions the viability as of now.

1. When I create new entries the corresponding category feeds are not pinged to any server. WordPress ping implementation is very basic. You don’t even know if your pings have gone through in the first place!

Many aggreagtors rely on the ping update to promptly update their listing like JavaBlogs or Technorati. Some don’t even access the feed at all. They rely solely on the ping like WebLogs or Artima Buzz feeds. This approach is clearly not working in these cases.

2. There are certain entries which I think may be of general interest. I do not want to pollute the category hierarchy by marking it as belonging to every category. There is no way to update each feed with it as a special case.

I am planning to write few plugins to correct the situation. My miniscule knowledge of php allowed me to write my first WordPress plugin on nofollow. However this effort requires that I learn php in more depth. I have started.

Till then it is aggregated feed for you guys (and gals) again. Bear with me till I fix WordPress

Update: It has been fixed. Now each category behaves as an independent blog. All the above issues have been addressed by a custom plugin I developed and deployed on this site. And with it my knowledge of PHP