I've been trying to automate the process by which I can ping Weblogs.com that my blog has been updated. Weblogs.com allows bloggers to automatically or manually ping it via XML-RPC or similar protocols. A fellow on the weblogs.com mailing list posted a simple perl script that would ping Weblogs.com via its submission form. I use Greymatter for my blogging needs, and it's entirely in perl. I added a few lines to the Add New Entry part of gm.cgi for those of you in the know:
use LWP::Simple;
$ping = "http://newhome.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm?" .
"name=GlennLog" .
"&url=http://blog.glennf.com/";
get($ping);
I added this at line 3372 in the program, although you might make sure that's the right place. It's right after a line reading close(FUNNYFEET). No kidding.
You also need to make sure that you have the LWP library installed under perl, which you can get from CPAN.