Update-Links.php and Ping-o-Matic

Since I dont have cron job access, I’ve been using a butchered version of Carthik’s “Update Blogroll” plugin to hit the update-link.php file to show recently updated links. Now ever since Ping-o-Matic went offline it started throwing up

“Warning: fsockopen(): unable to connect to api.pingomatic.com:80 in C:\Domains\[snipped]\wwwroot\journal\wp-admin\update-links.php on line 26”

Now Ping-o-Matic is back online it’s still throwing these errors my way.

Does anyone have a good idea of how to stop the update-links.php hitting Ping-o-Matic?

As a side note, I said some 11 months ago that Ping-O-Matic wasn’t the best choice to solely track weblog updates, this kinda just goes to prove it