PHP Blog Pinger with Curl

[mikewagan]

hello guys! here's the thing: i need to write a PHP/C script that sends out XML-RPC for technorati, yahoo, and other blog sites. It's basically an automated blog pinger. Unfortunately i always get a "400 Bad Request" response from the hosts. I'm using curl with PHP (or) C. Here's my code in PHP:

[PHP]
$request = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?><methodCall><methodName>weblogUpd ates.ping</methodName><params><param><value>".$_GET['blogurl']."</value></param><param><value>".$_GET['title']."</value></param></params></methodCall>";

$header[] = "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.001 (windows; U; NT4.0; en-us) Gecko/25250101";
$header[] = "Host: ".$_GET['hosturl'];
$header[] = "Content-type: text/xml";
$header[] = "Content-length: ".strlen($request) . "\r\n";
$header[] = $request;
echo "Sending ping to ".$_GET['hosturl'].$_GET['directory']."\n";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $_GET['hosturl'].$_GET['directory']); # URL to post to
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 ); # return into a variable
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header ); # custom headers, see above
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST,' POST '); # This POST is special, and uses its specified Content-type
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_0);
$result = curl_exec( $ch ); # run!
curl_close($ch);

echo $result;[/PHP]

Take note that I don't have the XML-RPC extension build with my PHP installation. Thanks for any help guys!