Ping This

One area I am very lax in: pinging the services, such as Google, Technorati, et al, when I make journal entries. Do I care? Not really, though some more readers would be nice. Never seem to have attracted much from those services, but worth the try.

When I used WordPress, I used Ping-o-Matic by default. So I figured, let me go there to see who they ping for you as a part of the service. Nice thing is that they give a link to those they do. So, I did a ping via the web interface, choosing all the generalized ones. A bit disheartening to see that half of them failed.

So, while I watch Olbermann,  I am taking a bit of time to go to each site and see (1) if they still exist and (2) if they really fit my needs. The results are tabulated below:

Weblogs.com [link]

Worked fine!

Blo.gs [link]

Didn't work - appears that since Yahoo! bought them, no site updates have been done (except for requiring an IP address to use their tag cloud.

Technorati [link]

Worked fine, except they said I just had just pinged them (don't think I had)

Feed Burner [link]

Worked fine (I use FeedBurner for my feeds!)

Syndic8 [link]

One word: slow and my feed never showed up.

NewsGator [link]

Found the ping address, jury is still out.

My Yahoo! [link]

Already covered using Site Map - may not be instantaneous, but who cares (once a day)

PubSub.com [link]

Off the air (see you in the winter of '08)

Blogdigger [link]

I see download our tool bar. I say I don't need no stinking tool bar.

BlogRolling [link]

Web-based ping page never loaded. Oh well.

BlogStreet [link]

Not going to ping - South Asian blogs

Moreover [link]

Found the ping URL, it worked.

Weblogalot [link]

As in "We Blog A Lot" - pinged, never crawled, oh well

Icerocket [link]

Found and worked!

News Is Free [link]

On their FAQ page, only two blogging software packages they are aware of are Blogger and Radio Userland. Must live in a vacuum.

Topic Exchange [link]

Server is refusing all connections, even on their main web site.

Well, that was an exercise in futility! Funny, too - Ping-o-matic doesn't ping Google. Must be a religious thing. So, while googling for something else, I found that FeedBurner has a ping'er built into it, called PingShot! So, now I am off to do two things:

1. Hook up PingShot.
2. Read through the other gazillion options in FeedBurner. Always best to move your workload off on someone else's server!

More on this whole subject later! And I still need to remember to use tags and keywords.