Pings????
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Ok, may seem like a silly question but what is ‘pinging’ all about? I’m new blogging and this site so not up-to-date with all the terms:)
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A ping is an electronic pulse sent between computers to notify of the event of you publishing a post or someone linking to it. When we publish posts here there is an automatic pinging service that goes into action (pingomatic). http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/05/11/how-do-i-send-a-ping/
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I’m not sure I get this either. Just checked ‘time thief’s’ suggested link, and found it sort of imcomprehensible…. Is it just me???
Can someone perhaps take another run at it for us neophytes…
How does one ‘ping’ and what does one get when ‘pinging’??
Thanks. C -
A ping is an electronic notification that passes between computers. The ping is delivered by a utility and determines whether a specific IP address is accessible. It works by sending a packet to the specified address and waiting for a reply.
When we publish a post on a wordpress.com blog unless we set our blogs not to ping, then an automatic ping (message) is sent through ping-o-matic to other sites like Technorati to notify the search spiders to come out and index the published post. http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/05/11/how-do-i-send-a-ping/
http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/04/23/can-i-stop-self-pings/
http://pingomatic.com/
Some of us also manually ping pingoat as well http://pingoat.com/ and Technorati http://technorati.com/ping -
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So, essentially, computer ‘A’ sends out a ping to computer ‘B’ that says “here I am” and computer ‘B’ pings back with “message received”.
I run a site on WordPress for a local genealogal society. The name of the site is “Omaha Obits” (www.omahaobits.wordpress.com). The site contains over 104,000 obituary listings and is updated several times a month as more listings become available. Being new to running a web site when I first started Omaha Obits, and not knowing what pinging was, I chose to disable all pinging. My question is: what would be the advantage to me, if any, of enabling pinging?
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As TT said, basically pinging is a notification system, so where you might find it useful is if you make a post which references another site or blog. It lets the other site/blog know that there’s an article or listing about them, and so they can come over and check it out. The same thing happens in reverse; if you have pinging enabled and someone references your blog, then you get the notification and can see what it is (useful to see if it’s legitimate or if someone has stolen your work, for instance).
It can also be useful on your own blog too. If you reference a previous post, the link provides a quick way for your readers to find similar information; and the ping tells people who commented on the previous post that there’s a new one they might be interested in. Hope that helps.
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