Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Updating Blogrolling.com and Weblogs.com

I got an e-mail the other day from reliapundit of The Astute Blogger. Actually, he sent it to several people and included me. He was asking about updating BlogRolls.
Have you (all) noticed how poorly the pinging feature of blogrolls has been
for the last month?

What can be done about it?

Are there other services we can use? Blogger relies on Weblogs. Can we use
two?

Please advise. Pinging is critical to notifying potential readers there is a
new post up. This lack of pinging has halved my daily traffic.

He noticed the same thing I have noticed. That is, when I add a new post, BlogRolls don't always catch that they have been updated. And that can cause traffic to drop.

Blogrolling.com, who is used by many, many blogs (including this one), get their information from Weblogs.com.

Sometimes, this process doesn't work as it should. And sometimes days ... or even weeks ... can go by with a blog listed as not being updated, even though it has been updated.

What to do?

Well, the hard way, is to use the Weblogs.com ping form or the BlogRolling.com ping form. But I hate forms.

I'd rather do it an easier way.

So I use bookmarks to notify Blogrolling.com, Weblogs.com, and Technorati.com that I've updated my site. And it's really easy.

Read on.

First, you need to know how to create a bookmark. Internet Explorer uses bookmarks, but calls them "Favorites." Hmph. Microsoft. But Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and most everybody else calls them bookmarks.

Anyway, you will need to know how to create one. If you don't know how, you're screwed. If you know how to create one, but don't know how to edit one, you're screwed. Or you can see the bottom of this post. Maybe you're not screwed after all.

Here are links that allow you to notify services that your blog has been updated. These examples are for this little blog. You'd need to modify them with information for your blog.


Now, keep in mind that each of these links/bookmarks/favorites go on one line. You may be seeing one or more of them on mulitple lines, but that's a display only issue. Each link/bookmark/favorite goes on a single line.

And they work. Well, they work for me. And reliapundit says they work for him. Maybe they'll work for you.

UPDATE START

Since this first appeared this morning, I've received additional tips on services that to mass pinging. Well, I've checked them out, and here's what I find:

Ping-o-Matic: The idea looks great. Plus they have a bookmark feature that allows you to save a bookmark and re-do the entire mass pinging later with a single click. That's a very useful feature. I like it.

Except for one thing: Although it indicated that it updated Blogrolling.com, it didn't. At least, BlogRolls I looked at did not reflect an update. And, a friend had the same experience. But, another said it worked for her. Go figure.

PingMyBlog: Similar to Ping-o-Matic. But three things I found different.

  1. Doesn't ping as many as Ping-o-Matic. That's bad. Unless you don't care about the ones PingMyBlog omits.
  2. Doesn't have a bookmark feature. That's bad. For me anyway. I don't want to have to fill out a form. Plus, my attempt to create a bookmark for it, like I did for Blogrolling the others, failed.
  3. The pinging of Blogrolling.com works. That's good. Because that's what we were after the whole time.

Here's a summary of my thoughts on all this:

  • To quickly ping Blogrolling.com without filling out a form, use the bookmark I wrote.
  • To quickly ping many, use Ping-o-Matic, then follow up with my Blogrolling.com bookmark.
  • To quickly ping almost as many, use PingMyBlog if you have a browser feature to automatically fill in forms for you.

Your additional thoughts and comments are, of course, welcome.

UPDATE II

phin sends this word:
Wordpress and their update function is much like the one available in Movable Type: To get to the enter the list of sites you want to ping when you log to the admin side click Options, then Writing, at the bottom of the page you can then enter the list of sites you want to ping.

UPDATE END



How To Create A Bookmark (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape)

  1. Select Bookmarks|Manage Bookmarks.
  2. Select File|New Bookmark.
  3. Type in any name and location(URL)
  4. Click Enter.


How To Create A Favorite (Internet Explorer)

  1. Go to the page that you want to add to your Favorites list.
  2. On the Favorites menu, click Add to Favorites.
  3. Type a new name for the page if you want to.

One catch: To add the Blogrolling.com link (favorite) to Internet Explorer, you'll need to edit it once you've added it. Trust me on this. You won't have to edit the Technorati or Weblogs.com links.

To edit, after you've added it, find it on your list of favorites. The, right-click, then select Properties. You can change the name of the link (if you wish) from the General tab. You will have to change the URL on the Web Document tab. Type it in as it appears in the list on this page.



Posted at Outside The Beltway Traffic Jam.

20 comments:

  1. Hey, that's pretty slick! Thanks for the useful info!

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  2. I also recommend Ping-O-Matic. You can ping all of the blog services at once. It's handy when Blogrolling is down or if you can't ping from your blog.

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  3. Gennie:
    A friend tried Ping-O-Matic, but found it didn't update Blogrolling.com for him when he tried it.

    Whether there is a flaw in Ping-O-Matic, or if Blogrolling.com was down at the time, I can't say.

    I tried it today, and it indicated that it worked. So, it looks like I need to update my post.

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  4. I use www.pingmyblog.com

    it works like a champ

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  5. I use pingomatic.com myself. But we shouldn't have to. Maybe someone needs to come up with a better system. But then again, I have to manually trackback so why should I expect anything to work right?

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  6. Jo:
    You're right. A better system is needed. But I'm not smart enough to invent it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Dude, Pingmyblog! Just tried that...took like 20 seconds and POOF! All done. If only my clients could be like Pingmyblog.

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  8. MovableType is configurable to ping any service. I am using 3.16, so I do not know about other versions. Go to Configuration : Preferences. Find "Notify the following sites when I update my blog:" and paste the URL into the "Others" box. You will need to rebuild afterwards.

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  9. Increased Visability

    If you're trying to figure out why some people's blog rolls show New, *** or something else letting people know that a site has been updated wonder no more. The Recently Updated feature in blogrolling's preferences page allows you to

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  10. I, for one, am getting entirely sick of manually pinging blogrolling. I have checked, and the info makes it to weblogs, but doesn't make it to blogrolling. Of course, it is a free service, so.....

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  11. Pinging 101

    A great tech post on how to "Ping" from Basil. Very helpful.

    Read it HERE

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  12. Thanks for the information and the research. I too had noticed how poorly updates were being listed, and had actualyl turned off the Blogroll update thingie. If everyone would do the ping bookmarks once a day then we'd all have great information about updates.

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  13. Feisty:
    Yes, PingMyBlog seems to work. If only I didn't have to fill out a form.

    oregano:
    Thanks for the tip for MovableType. Can you confirm that it updates Blogrolling properly?

    William Teach:
    I found the same thing. That's why I created the Blogrolling.com bookmark.

    Shamalama:
    Thanks.

    Oh, I tried creating a PingMyBlog bookmark, but the form doesn't like the data in URL variables. PHP (which it uses) normally doesn't care, but you can make it care. It appears to me that they made it care. So my bookmark doesn't work dor them. If it could work that way, that would be the best solution.

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  14. Yeah, Ping-o-Matic doesn't work for Blogrolling right. I use Ping-o-Matic and then use a bookmark for Blogrolling.

    This has inspired me to write a Ping-o-Matic clone that works... It isn't that difficult..

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  15. Hans Mast:
    Is it publicly available? Something you'd be willing to share with the rest of the class?

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  16. phin:
    Thanks! That clarifies.

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  17. The Pinging and the Ringing of the Blogs Blogs Blogs

    (apologies to EA Poe) basil has a bunch of great stuff about helping increase your blog traffic by making sure you show up as updated on the many blog listing services out there. He even made some custom bookmarks to...

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  18. Thanks for the Ping tutorial. I implemented your suggestions. They are working great!

    JB

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  19. Glad you found them to be of use.

    ReplyDelete

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