A number of users have told me that posting to b2 is sometimes really slow. I suspected it was because b2 pings weblogs.com and blo.gs, and this post shows that it is a problem with weblogs.com
PHP Traveller documented a way for PHP to execute commands after a browser session/request is completed. It looks like a feature that isn’t very portable across PHP versions so probably not a reasonable solution for a publicly distributed application.
Holy Shmoly!
Look what I found today!
My solution to the delay on weblogs.com was to implement my pinging of it in a shell-script that fires when the source for my front-page has changed. Details at http://davespicks.com/ping_weblogs.html but the short version is that a recurring job (run by cron) checks for a change, and if so, that handles pinging weblogs.com. The extra level of indirection makes life a lot easier for me.