Among the various news aggregation portals (Bloglines, Artima, etc.), I really like the layout and variety of Technorati’s ruby tag (also linked in the right-hand column.) Artima has a tendency to forget about the site for a few days here and there. Technorati allows you to trigger an update by pinging its service.

The Technorati docs are a bit sketchy, though, so I’m going to save you a bit of time, should you want to join in. Here’s how to add your blog to the ruby tag on Technorati:

1. Add Dublin Core subject tags to each entry in your RSS or Atom feed, using the word “ruby” as the content.

    <?xml version='1.0'?>
    <feed version='0.3' xml:lang='en'
      xmlns:dc='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/' 
      xmlns='http://purl.org/atom/ns#'>
   
    ...
   
      <entry>
        <title>CashHanded #5: Merchant Tools</title>
        <dc:subject>cult</dc:subject>
        <dc:subject>ruby</dc:subject>
   

2. Issue a ping to your feed. So, in my case, I used http://redhanded.hobix.com/index.xml in the URL box.

3. If you’d like to automate updates to Technorati, setup your blog software to ping Technorati.

    begin
        server = XMLRPC::Client.new( "rpc.technorati.com",
                                     "/rpc/ping", 80 )
   
        begin
            result = server.call( "weblogUpdates.ping", 
                         "Your blog's name",
                         "http://your.blog.com/index.xml" )
        rescue XMLRPC::FaultException => e
            puts "Error: [#{ e.faultCode }] #{ e.faultString }" 
        end
    rescue Exception => e
        puts "Error: #{ e.message }" 
    end