I think it would be cool/fun/smart to allow my web clients and associates to ping me when they update their sites, like I can ping pMachine from my EE site.

EE already has the ability to send a ping, but it would be great to receive them too.

Might need some sort of password system to prevent ping-spam?

Is this already an option, but I’m just not spending enough time in the user manual to find it?

Maybe this is a future plug-in?

We could call the plug-in “Ping-Pong” maybe?

Ping-Pong, eh?  Hmmmm…

Actually, the ability to have an XML-RPC server, which is what is used for receiving pMachine.com pings and weblogs.com-like pings, is already available in ExpressionEngine via the core.xmlrpcs.php file.  There is just a lack of any documentation for using the script, and considering the inherent complexity in the script (and the fact that I wrote it back last November) there is not likely going to be any detailed documentation any time soon.

As for ping spam, it is really just XML data coming through a POST request, so you can have certain error checking, passwords, and blocking for the information being received.  Currently, the XML-RPC files in ExpressionEngine are not set up to allow secure connections though, so there is that limitation.  However, you do not see any of the major ping sites using secure connections either.

Perhaps if you send me an email I will give you an example script and let you play with it yourself.

I know I’m not the only one who would be interested to see what you can make it do, PDX.