(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
Another “dot five” part. I really should have written about this earlier in the series.
You may have heard (and indeed used) “pings” in the computer networking context, like when a computer “pings” another to see whether it’s “alive” and whether there’s a connection between both. Here, however, I’m talking about another kind of pings.
If you’ve been blogging for a while, your blog is probably already indexed on several blogging-related sites. Not just search engines or directories. There are also external aggregators. And “last updated blogs” lists, like Weblogs.com or blo.gs. And Technorati or IceRocket, which index not just blogs, but their very articles, by subjects or “tags”, and also index which blogs link to which blogs. Maybe you use FeedBurner for your feed(s). Maybe you’re on BlogShares. Or Syndic8. No, this list isn’t exhaustive - far from it.
The point here is that all these sites, to be useful (that is, to not only do the things they do (BlogShares, for instance, is like a virtual stock market, with blogs - try it!), but also to bring you new hits), need to know when you’ve updated your blog, when there are new posts.
To do that, you ping them.
How is that done? There are three stages of “pinging evolution”:
- most of those particular sites have a “my blog is updated” (that description can vary a lot, of course) page, where you type your blog’s URL, click on a button, and it knows it’s updated. Of course, doing that manually on all those sites, for each post, is more work than it’s worth…
- …therefore, they created XML-RPC interfaces, which allow your blog itself to ping those sites. WordPress and Movable Type, for instance, have a place in their options (in WordPress, for example, it’s called “Update Services”) where you add the URLs for pinging every time you add a new post. The URLs are given by the services themselves, so it’s possible to have a huge list there. But that’s still, in my opinion, too complicated. There should be an easier, better way, right?
- and there is. First, there was Ping-o-Matic, then BlogFlux’s Pinger, and now there is Pingoat. (note that those are not the RPC pinging addresses, but the addresses of their web sites, where you can tell them to ping all their known update services, by typing your blog’s name and URL. For the RPC pinging, you have to take note of the RPC URL there, and that’s what you’ll use in your blog.) Instead of having a list of 20 RPC addresses in your blog’s configuration, you can just have one. And when new update services appear, or some vanish, the “multiple pinger service” will probably update its list, so you don’t have to change anything.
From there, you’re probably guessing that the third option is the best - and you’re right.
Now, there’s no need (or advantage - it can even be a bad idea) to have more than one of these services configured in your blog. If you had two of them, for instance, that would simply mean you were pinging Weblogs.com twice, blo.gs twice, and so on. No advantage in that - and they may even notice it, and block your blog’s repeated updates as spamming. So, just pick one.
So, which one?
This is just my personal experience, and it may change in the future (I’ll try to update this entry in the future, if/when the situation changes), but the best, as of now, seems to be Pingoat. Ping-o-Matic, due to being the first and most successful, has been unreliable for the past couple of months, and, at the moment, Pingoat seems to work every time, without problems. It also pings more services than Ping-o-Matic.
So, how to configure your blog? If you’re using WordPress, Movable Type or some similar software, just type:
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
in your “Update Services” list. Note the upper case “RPC” - it’s important. Just copy & paste the above. (it may also change, in the future - if in doubt, go to Pingoat’s site). You probably don’t need any other URLs there - certainly not any that’s included in Pingoat (see its front page for the list), or other “multi-update services” like Ping-o-Matic, as I’ve already said.
What if you don’t control your blog’s software? I don’t know about Blogger or LiveJournal - I’ve heard they update just Weblogs.com automatically, though that information may be outdated. Well, just do it manually, after you post. Go to Pingoat’s front page, fill in the details, select the services to ping, and click on the button. A little more work, but at least you only have to do one thing after each post.
Note: when selecting the update services, don’t pick the ones that are not appropriate. For instance, some are related to Podcasting, and, unless your blog includes such, you shouldn’t try to submit it to an “updated Podcasts” list. Use common sense - abuse can end up being punished.
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