Fixing MT ping errors

I was visiting Tiger’s site today and noticed that he was having some problems with his Movable Type ping notifications. I have had these problems and still do on occasion. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing my midnight surfing thing and I came across a post that addresses this problem.[Solution of the behavior is in the comments section of the post.] The post clearly explains the situation:

There are two perspectives on the update ping. One perspective is that of weblogs.com and one perspective is that of your MT system.

When weblogs.com receives your ping it does a number of things. It visits your site to see if you have in fact updated since the last ping, it adds your blog name to its “recently updated” list, and then it sends out a response to you. If it’s able to do all of these things, it considers your ping to have been successful.

But here’s the thing. Let’s say that it takes weblogs.com 60 seconds to go through the whole process. Your MT system may only wait 30 or 45 seconds for that response. If it doesn’t get the response in that time, it assumes that the ping failed. Even though your blog shows up at weblogs.com as having been updated.

The fix is very simple. You have to go into your mt.cfg file and adjust the “PingTimeout” entry. Now, if you never played with this file, then you will have an example entry in there. You could either uncomment the entry and adjust the number or add an entry and give it a number. I have mine set to 60 and it seems to work well. I have fewer errors with that.