Handy for sending your own pings inside applications. Requires the XML-RPC for PHP library.

Weblog_Pinger: Update Notification PHP Library

Weblog_Pinger is a PHP class library that can send update notification pings over XML-RPC services such as Weblogs.Com, Blo.gs, Ping-o-Matic and Technorati.

This supports the use of the newer (December 2004) [experimental] extended ping for RSS:

In December 2004, as an experiment, we implemented an “extended ping” handler that allows a caller to specify the address of an RSS feed in addition to the address of the weblog. This could make it easier for applications that use the output of weblogs.com to do interesting things with RSS.