blogio blogging blog » Ping-o-Matic http://blogio.net/blog blogging about blogging... Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:18:19 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Embrace the power of pings http://blogio.net/blog/2008/12/04/embrace-the-power-of-pings/ http://blogio.net/blog/2008/12/04/embrace-the-power-of-pings/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:51:02 +0000 Nico http://blogio.net/blog/?p=64 Continue reading →]]> Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.

If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.

This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)

Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.

There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!

Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

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