Lets talk about pinging

Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 10:52 am

Pinging [ 3:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A few similar questions have come in:

Do you use Submit Em Now in place of or in addition to UP Smart Update Pinger? What are the advantages / disadvantages to using each?

I want to know more about RSS feeds to and from my blog. I have a blog at ccblog. Also, with my ccblog, can I use different services to ping it or is it already done automatically?

First lets address SubmitEm Now – This is a plugin for Firefox. It is used to submit your RSS feed to the various RSS directories. It saves you time by allowing you to fill in a form and then use that information at each of the sites without having to retype it each time. It is not part of your blog.

Now the Smart Update Pinger plugin is part of your blog. It’s purpose is to keep you from over pinging. It checks to see if a specific post has been pinged before and if it haves does not ping it again.

This overcomes a problem if you are editing posts. For example – I don’t know why but quite often I will type ofr instead of for. I usually don’t catch it until after I publish the post. If I did not use the plugin then when I hit the edit button to fix it the post would ping again. Keep pinging quickly back to back and your feed will be dropped as a spammer.

Now the pinging is done automatically by the WordPress software. You can and should add additional ping services to your ping list. You can add to your ping list by using settings (options if you are not using v2.5) – writing. At the bottom of the page you will see a box where you can add these sources and click the update button.

You can also find a link to a complete list of ping services in the text above the box.

Hopefully this sheds some light on the differences but if not your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold