Pinging google sitemap after every new article submission?

Question

As you may know, by using the following url, you can 'ping' google to update its record of your sitemap:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=URLOFSITEMAP.xml

I made a script to do this programmatically after every article submission (I am making a user submitted blog type site).

Do you think its a bad idea to do this after every submission and would it be better to do this daily or after some interval?

I guess this would come down to whether or not there is a chance that doing this would stall the application execution. The pinging is not done asynchronously so I guess there is always a chance. I was just wondering if anybody has implemented this programmatically and what his/her approach was.

Answer 1

Take a look at the code for the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for Wordpress. A lot of people use that and it does not seem to slow things down enough to notice. Whatever methodology they are using should be a good place to start.