Telling The World About Your New Blog Post

Wordpress is set up with the ability to automatically tell others whenever you have spoken. After all, there is no point in publishing if no-one comes to read what you have written.

Many new users of Wordpress are puzzled about how this notification to others takes place, especially when the first words they come across are things like 'ping' and 'ping servers' when they are possibly still struggling with the basics of logging in to their new blog.

Although Wordpress is set up to deal with it automatically, in practice there are many choices available. Wordpress calls them Update Services and you will find them in your Writing Settings right down at the bottom of the page.

The default setting on installation is, from memory, Pingomatic and Pingoat. These services distribute the fact that you have just published a new post by 'pinging' a number of ping servers. However, there are a multitude of other ping services.

What there is not is any common opinion about how successful or otherwise any combination of ping servers might be. Indeed there is an argument that multiple ping servers will often be notifying the same servers many times and this can get your message blocked as spam.

Myself, I work on the basis that even if some get blocked I would like to at least make the effort to get my message out there by as many channels as I can. So I use a pretty big list.

There's a useful article on the basics of 'pinging' - where I just found out that a ping is a 'groper'(!) and my page on blogging for more information.