Blosxom has a couple of plugins to ping weblogs.com and blo.gs when new entries are posted, either via HTTP GET or XML-RPC. But these scripts have a problem; they run as synchronous plugins, forcing whatever hapless user hits your blog first to wait while the servers do their thing (or don’t - weblogs.com is awfully slow sometimes).

My little pinger.py script works a different way, running as a cron job periodically and checking if it needs to ping. Not robust; only recommended for Python hackers.