loving the dot com

So you’ve got a blog, and you’ve got something written down. Make sure the almighty blogosphere know it exists, and make sure people can easily find it again.

Recognition - LOOK! I’M OVER HERE! (aka XML-RPC Pings)

Most blogging software has the ability to send what’s called a ‘ping’ to blog indexing services (basically big lists of who’s written what and when), Wordpress is no different. This ping tells the indexing service that you’ve written something new and they should come and take a look at it. You should find that as soon as you hit “Publish!” you’ll get a load of hits from various web spiders as they digest your latest offering.

You can see the list of place your Wordpress blog pings by going to Options -> Writing in the control panel and looking at the “Update Services” box at the bottom of the page. By adding a list of servers in this box you can get Wordpress to automatically send ‘pings’ to all the servers each time you post a new article.

Here’s the list of servers I currently send a ping to whenever I publish a new post:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php

There will always be more servers you can add to this list, so it’s well worth keeping an eye on it from time to time.

Syndication - Getting acknowledgement, and getting people to return

If you look in the toolbar on the right (well, it was on the right when I wrote this), you’ll see a load of little buttons under the “Syndication” heading. Each of these buttons allows someone to easily link your blog into their blog service of choice. That way they don’t have to bookmark your URL or remember the address, it’s automatically added right where they want it. This is a good thing. I know this because as soon as I added these buttons the number of return visitors to the site started adding up (thanks to Google Analytics for those statistics)

That’s it for now, but I’ll be adding more very soon, with a round-up at the end of the week.