Eleven months ago I had an idea about a WordPress feature which gives a user the opportunity to put blog into maintenance mode, or turning it On/Off in special occasions to be more exact. I didn’t hesitate to suggest it to the public WP community. For eleven months, except good willing WP users, nobody from WordPress team has ever commented or said anything about possibly implementing that in any of the upcoming versions. Indeed, that can be achieved by developing a custom plug-in, but most bloggers (me for sure) tend to avoid activating too many plug-ins because it plods blog performance.

What about self-pinging?

Right! I’m sure you should already be aware of what does the term ping stand for in blogging. According to this WikiPedia article ping is:

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.[1] An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.


Now there’s this very requested feature (No-Self-Ping) that has been discussed a lot around the interwebs lately, but at the time of writing it is only available as a plug-in. Honestly, pinging your own blog posts is sometimes very annoying, however, some bloggers don’t mind that but some others really do. Hence, thankfully to No-Self-Ping by Michael Adams, the annoyance is long gone and forgotten. I just had to play around with WP Core files and have modified some of them to add this option in WP-Admin –> Settings –> Discussion Settings for the only reason of not being a fan of too-many-activated-plugins at once.

self-ping-option

Wouldn’t you really appraise a neat feature like that, an optional setting that can be turned on and off based of each of us personal taste.

Now as for No-Self-Ping, it isn’t really a big deal though because it is the smallest plug-in I have ever come across until today, so it wouldn’t really decrease your blog’s performance much. Only seven lines of code for a very useful option.

<?php
function no_self_ping( &$links ) {
$home = get_option( 'home' );
foreach ( $links as $l => $link )
if ( 0 === strpos( $link, $home ) )
unset($links[$l]);
}
add_action( 'pre_ping', 'no_self_ping' );
?>

Seriously I would like to see this feature in the upcoming version WordPress 2.8, it will save our time and it’s nice to just have it there.

Where do you stand in this? Do you like pinging your own blog posts, or rather have that thing turned off?

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