If you’re receiving emails with error messages that read, “CURL error: Operation timed out…” despite the fact that AMA has published a post on your blog, then log in to the WordPress admin panel of your blog, and please check the following:

Go to Options/Settings, Writing, and look at the list of ping services in the “Update Services” text box.

If you have a long list of ping services there, then that’s probably the reason why you’re getting the error messages.

Pinging all those services is taking so long that the AMA software times out while waiting for your blog to respond back to say that the post was successfully published.

Please remove some of the ping services until you don’t get the error message. You really only need http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in the list, and that one alone won’t slow down publishing on your site.

The AMA system cannot wait indefinitely for your blog to respond, otherwise we would never be able to get through all the publishing that the system must do.

If removing the ping services does not solve the issue, then check if any plugins are slowing down the publishing process.

If your blog runs WordPress 2.6 or later, you must explicitly enable the XML-RPC remote publishing interface, otherwise AMA won’t be able to publish to your site.

Log in to your blog with the admin account, and go to Settings, and then Writing.

Check the box next to “XML-RPC” on the Writing options page, and save the settings.

If you are one of the (un)lucky people to have received emails from the AMA system with errors that were detected while publishing articles to your site, then please take note of the following.

If you receive an error message and the article was actually successfully published on your site, the most likely cause was a plugin on your site that either crashed or generated PHP warning messages.

Some plugins run after WordPress has published a post. When we publish to the blog, we expect a well-formed XML document back from WordPress to tell the AMA system that the post was successfully published.

The trouble is, if a plugin (or any other PHP script) generates errors or warnings on your site at that point, those error or warning messages are included in the response we get back from WordPress.

That extra content breaks the XML, and then AMA cannot understand the response we received from your site.

Check the “error_log” of your site for any PHP error or warning messages generated by plugins. If possible, please deactivate those plugins.

You can usually find the “error_log” file in the root (home) folder of your site.

We’ve noticed that the OnlyWire plugin is one of those that crashes the XML-RPC interface on some blogs.