What is pinging blogs and how to ping?

Learn about pinging and a list of services suited best for pinging your blog/ website.

Ping in Blogging terminology is a push or forward mechanism by which a blog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.

For example if you post an article at your blogging site, How do you suppose the servers and search engines be updated about your new content? Pinging is not a problem for blogger, as it automatically updates the database in google, what about other directories? There comes the need for pinging mechanism.

The technology was first introduced by Dave Winer to Weblogs.com in October 2001. Today, most blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.
A very popular and trusted ping site is pingomatic at http://pingomatic.com/
It also uses the same XML-RPC push mechanism. It is the brainchild of the WordPress Foundation which is is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source.

But there are also some times and places where you should not ping. Sherryl Perry explained clearly in her post about When should you not ping. Just insert your blog credentials in the text boxes, and you're good to go.

Now select the services to which you want your blog status to be updated.

Click on send pings.
You'll recieve a confirmation page.

That's it, Your pings are sent.

Alternatives

If you need more alternatives, Pingler too is a great service. Though signup is free but the minimum premium account allows a user to store 25 links in the account. For more information feel free to visit the price list page of the service.
Pingnates lets the users ping their blog to more than 40 search engines and service.
The Just ping service has been explained before, It can ping from 50 locations in the world.

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