Ping My Blog is a bulk ping service, similar to Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. In fact, BlogExplosion’s ping service is supported by Pingoat, so if you already use Pingoat, you don’t have to use Ping My Blog ping service.

Ping, or pinging, itself is a way to notify or send notice to blog search engine, blog feed, or even another ping service. By pinging all of the them, you notify them that you have fresh content to index. That means you have instructed them to spider your latest entry. Getting noticed by the big search engines means much more outside traffic to you. You can read more about ping in here.

If you go to Ping My Blog page, you’ll get the same page as Pingoat’s ping page. Login to your BlogExplosion account first, then select all the services to ping (or choose some of them if you don’t want to ping them all), and click Ping My Blog Now button to start sending ping to all or selected websites.

Since I already use Pingoat ping service, along with Ping-Matic’s, I don’t need to use BlogExplosion’s Ping My Blog. Also, Ping My Blogs doesn’t support XML-RPC yet, so it’s not for anyone who use blogging platform that already give support for automatic ping through XML-RPC, such as Wordpress.

[ Try Ping My Blog ]

Unfortunately, the popularity of Ping-O-Matic makes this ping service sometime become slow or down. Another alternative to Ping-O-Matic is Pingoat. Pingoat is a good ping service which support 54 ping services. Here’s the bookmarklet code for Pingoat which, like my previous bookmarklet for Ping-O-Matic, will automatically ping all the services supported by Pingoat for current active website on a single click.

javascript:location.href='http://www.pingoat.com/index.php?pingoat=go&blog_name='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&blog_url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&cat_0=1&id%5B%5D=0&id%5B%5D=1&id%5B%5D=2&id%5B%5D=3&id%5B%5D=4&id%5B%5D=5&id%5B%5D=6&id%5B%5D=7&id%5B%5D=8&id%5B%5D=9&id%5B%5D=10&id%5B%5D=11&id%5B%5D=12&id%5B%5D=13&id%5B%5D=14&id%5B%5D=15&id%5B%5D=16&id%5B%5D=17&id%5B%5D=18&id%5B%5D=19&id%5B%5D=20&id%5B%5D=21&id%5B%5D=22&id%5B%5D=23&id%5B%5D=24&id%5B%5D=25&id%5B%5D=26&id%5B%5D=27&id%5B%5D=28&id%5B%5D=29&cat_1=1&id%5B%5D=30&id%5B%5D=31&id%5B%5D=32&id%5B%5D=33&id%5B%5D=34&id%5B%5D=35&id%5B%5D=36&id%5B%5D=37&id%5B%5D=38&id%5B%5D=39&id%5B%5D=40&id%5B%5D=41&id%5B%5D=42&id%5B%5D=43&id%5B%5D=44&id%5B%5D=45&id%5B%5D=46&id%5B%5D=47&id%5B%5D=48&id%5B%5D=49&id%5B%5D=50&id%5B%5D=51&id%5B%5D=52&id%5B%5D=53&id%5B%5D=54&id%5B%5D=55&id%5B%5D=56&cat_2=1&id%5B%5D=57&id%5B%5D=58&id%5B%5D=59&id%5B%5D=60&id%5B%5D=61&id%5B%5D=62&id%5B%5D=63'

Drag this link to your bookmark toolbar to add the bookmarklet. To submit your website to Pingoat, go to the main page of your website, then click on the bookmarklet.

Most blogging software already have build-in ability to ping those kind of services. Usually, you only need to enter the address of the service, and everytime you publish a new post on your blog, it will automatically ping the services on the list.

A blog ping is just a piece of text, in simple words. It’ll contain your blog name and the url. A blog ping is usually sent in the XML format. The servers that accept ping have specialiced procedures for accepting and processing these ‘XML pings’. The API, a bridge between server and developer, available for XML format is XML-RPC. There is another API to ping the server, called REST.

There are several sources for the list of XML-RPC (and RPC2) ping services. EliottBack has a huge list of RPC and RPC2 services (over 56 RPC and RPC2). Emily (from HowToBlog) also put about 20-25 RPC and RPC2 service on her blog. Another one is from Ensight who has a list of around 43 RPC ping services.

The question is, do you have to use them all? In my opinion, no. Most of the ping services do ‘pararel’ ping, they also ping another ping service. So actually, you only need to choose several of them that, if combined, can cover the whole XML-RPC blog ping service. Or, choose the one that is reliable and popular enough.

My recommendation:

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
api.feedster.com/ping
api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
ping.blo.gs/
ping.feedburner.com
ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
rpc.pingomatic.com/
rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Pingoat is a good replacement for Ping-O-Matic (still down?). It covers over 54 ping services, including the other XML-RPC services I recommend above.

What if your favourite blogging engine doesn’t have that feature? Well, you have to do it manually from their site. Just enter the URL and the title of your blog, select which service to ping, submit. In the end of the ping processes, you’ll be offered to save or bookmarked a ‘unique’ link. Next time, if you want to notify Ping-O-Matic again, you don’t have to enter your blog URL and blog title again. Just activate that link and Ping-O-Matic will do the rest.

Now, the problem is, what if we have more than one blog that need to notify Ping-O-Matic manually? Using that ‘traditional’ method, you may end up with many links for Ping-O-Matic. What if we have just one link that work for all of our blogs? So no matter what your blog is, just activate the link, and it will automatically send notification to Ping-O-Matic.

Okay, first, here’s the code:

javascript:location.href='http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&blogurl='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&chk_weblogscom=on&chk_blogs=on&chk_technorati=on&chk_feedburner=on&chk_syndic8=on&chk_newsgator=on&chk_feedster=on&chk_myyahoo=on&chk_pubsubcom=on&chk_blogdigger=on&chk_blogrolling=on&chk_blogstreet=on&chk_moreover=on&chk_weblogalot=on&chk_icerocket=on&chk_audioweblogs=on&chk_rubhub=on&chk_geourl=on&chk_a2b=on&chk_blogshares=on'

If you notice, I replace the title and URL with JavaScript function which will automatically recognized our blog’s title and URL. Next, simply bookmark this link or drag it to your bookmark toolbar (on Mozilla/Firefox) for quick access. Now everytime you finish updating your blog, just go to the main page of your blog, and hit that bookmarklet.

If you don’t want to migrate to Wordpress (or any other blogging engine that have automatic ping feature) yet, I guess this is the easiest way to work with Ping-O-Matic.

Right? )