Put Some Ping Back in Your Blog

Somebody once asked me to write a post about pinging. The problem is the subject of pinging just so happens to be very large and can have many different applications.

So today I thought I would discuss about using a ping service after you have published your post up on your blog.

First off, let me say this … has anybody else noticed that Pingoat has been choking a lot lately? Apparently they have been suffering from information overload these days and blowing their MySQL database to smithereens.

So why did I bring this up? Because Pingoat just happens to be my favorite ping application when it’s working properly (and when it’s not Ping-o-matic is a close second).

Here is a description of what Pingoat does in their own words:

What in the world is Pingoat? Pingoat is a service that pingsor notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

Pretty straight forward stuff eh? This is what it looks like:

You might have noticed that one of the services that it pings is Feedburner. Once Feedburner knows you have written something, it will crawl your site and publish your new post to everyone who has subscribed to your newsfeed. Providing of course that you are using Feedburner (which you should).

Think of it as giving Feedburner a gentle nudge to wake up. Cool eh?

You might also have noticed that your Blog Host has a built-in ping option. For example, in Blogger you will find it in your dashboard under the menu “Settings“, “Publishing“. (Wordpress has the feature in the dashboard under “Options”, “Writing”, “Update Services”).

Using Blogger as our example, scrolling down the “Publishing” page you will find an option to “Send Pings”. Be sure to set it to “yes” and click on the “Save Settings” button.

So why bother using Pingoat you might ask? Even though Blogger has this functionality built in, I still use Pingoat because it pings so many more services.

After all, if you spent all that time writing your post, you want the world to know that it’s there don’t you.