on blog pinging

Sicilian asked:

"For those of us who don't know what pinging is. . . explain. . . sounds fun. . ."

"A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation.

In the typical scenario of using web feeds, a content provider publishes a feed link on their site which end users can register with an aggregator program (also called a feed reader or a news reader) running on their own machines; doing this is usually as simple as dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator. When instructed, the aggregator asks all the servers in its feed list if they have new content; if so, the aggregator either makes a note of the new content or downloads it. Aggregators can be scheduled to check for new content periodically.

The kinds of content delivered by a web feed are typically HTML (webpage content) or links to webpages and other kinds of digital media. Often when websites provide web feeds to notify users of content updates, they only include summaries in the web feed rather than the full content itself.

Web feeds are operated by many news web sites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters."

from the wikipedia article *web feed*

"RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts."

Ping (blogging)

"Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post (or updates an old one.) That is, the tool sends an XML-RPC signal to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material."

most of us in our blogging circle use blogrolling. so if you go to the ping form cited in the previous article, you can put your own, or someone else's blog in and have it manually go read whether there has been an update to the blog.

when blogger changed to *the new blogger* it buggered up their previous RSS/Atom feed which means the blogrolls aren't working right. this is a cross-internet phenomenon.

so until blogrolling or blogger change their code, we have to step in and do manual pings when we update so that people can see when we've updated - you know - the two little asterixes on the name on the blog in the blogroll

hope this is what you are looking for