reverend

I was just fooling around with the xmlrpc posting interface using a clean install of wordpress-072-gold, and was having an issue much like you describe. It looks like by default wordpress tries to write some debugging info into the file pingback.log when a post is done through the xmlrpc functions. You can either create a webserver writable file called pingback.log in the top level directory of your wordpress install, or go into the file xmlrpc.php on line 1691 and comment out the statement that sets $debug to 1. Before I did this I was getting error messages back from the post, and now it works perfectly.

I use feedvalidator.org to check on feeds, it actually tells you what line the error is on and gives an excerpt of the issue. In my experience it’s been really good about picking out issues, it’s a great service. For the URL posted it complained about the long dash in:
… ing up in their midst on the playground — although once reassured are of …