Tutorials

Pings

What are pings? Should I use them? Why? What good are they to me? How do I ping?

Read on and I’ll tell you. :)

A ping is a small signal that is send by your blogging software (like Movable Type, WordPress, or Blogger), to special sites whenever you update your site. These special sites collect these pings from all blogs that send them, and then publish them in the form of a list of recently updated sites. Sending pings will get your site listed in in places like that, and will potentially get you more visitors.

One of the best things about pinging is that it also notifies blogrolling.com that you updated your site. Blogrolling.com is a managment site for Link Lists (tutorial here), and when you let them know you updated your site, they will publish that on to all Link Lists in their database that are linked to you. That means you’ll move to the top of the list, or have your link singled out by a special image, etc, on all the sites that link to you through blogrolling.com. A pretty cool and easy way to get some more hits!

You can either ping all of the sites that collect these pings individually, or you can ping them all at once by using Ping-O-Matic. That’s what I’m doing, because it’s faster to ping one site than it is to ping, say, 20.

Sending pings is quite easy, depending on the blogging software you use. Here are some examples, but in other programs it should be similar:

Movable Type: Go into Weblog Config > Preferences > Publicity / Remote Interfaces / TrackBack. Untick the boxes for blo.gs and weblogs.com, and put the following into the text area:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

Save, and that’s it. :)

Wordpress: Go into Options > Writing and put the above ping address in the "Update Services" box, deleting all the ones currently there.

Blogger: Go into Settings > Publishing, and select Yes where it asks you to ping weblogs.com. Blogger won’t let you use the Ping-O-Matic, but it can ping weblogs, which in turn will update blogrolling.com, so it still works fine.

LiveJournal: Works the same as Blogger, in that it can only ping weblogs.com. However, this is a paid-only feature, so not everyone can use this. If you have a paid account though, go to Edit Info, and scroll all the way down. Near the bottom of the page is a check box for "Notify Weblogs.com of updates". Check it, save, and you’re done.

For other systems this will work similarly to the ways I described above. I don’t have access to all blogging systems, so I can’t detail it out, but hopefully this will give you a good idea.
Now, everyone start pinging, so my Link List with blogrolling.com is updated whenever you update your site, and I can read your new entries! ;)

Comments

Error Comments are closed for this entry.