Ping.fm Custom URL Functionality
Ping.fm is a message posting service that allows you to post to several social networking sites very easily (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.). It also allows you to post to several networks at the same time, and there are various desktop and mobile apps currently available that use this service. Recently I discovered that it also has custom URL functionality, which allows you to direct the messages to your personal website or a custom script. After discovering this, I decided to use this very convenient way to post messages for a personal site of mine. I created a PHP script and reused some code for posting status updates from a recent client (see previous post, Status Updates in MySQL).
Below is the list of variables sent with a Ping.fm custom url post:
- method – The method of the message being sent (blog, microblog, status).
- title – If method is “blog” then this contains the blog’s title.
- message – The posted message content.
- location – Any location updates posted with the message. This is plaintext, verbatim from the posting interface.
- media – If media is posted, this will contain a URL to the media file.
- raw_message – If media is posted, this will contain the posted message WITHOUT the hosted media link (i.e. http://ping.fm/p/12345).
- trigger – If you post a message with a custom trigger (http://ping.fm/triggers/), it will show here.
All that was needed for my script was to use the $_POST[] array to get the variables from the posted messages and use those variables in my script to insert the data into a MySQL database for later use. Now I can post news stories, status updates, and blog posts right to my website without having to log in to the administrative backend of my site. The apps I use to post are Meping on the desktop and Blackping on my Blackberry (requires custom trigger to post to custom url).
I’ve also thought of several other possibilities with the custom URL ping.fm functionality, such as HTML email marketing, which would normally be difficult to accomplish from a mobile phone, for example. All you would need to do to accomplish this is put the HTML template in your server-side script along with queries to your customer database and then include some key words in your pinged message that the script can parse (i.e. the location variable can contain which HTML template to use and some filter keywords for which customers to email).
All it takes is a little imagination, and the possibilities are almost endless with the ping.fm custom URL functionality. For now, I’m just happy that I can post messages to my website… Tomorrow, pinging NASA servers to send rockets into space.
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My name is Brandon Johnson and I am a web design and development professional from Salt Lake City, Utah. I develop web applications with particular focus on rich internet applications (RIAs) using Flash, Flex, AIR, and Ajax, with PHP/MySQL on the backend. I founded Technico Solutions in 2006 to provide coding solutions and ideas for developers in PHP, MySQL, Actionscript 2 & 3, Flash, Flex, AIR, and Ajax. 
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