what are pings?

[Nathan]

Wordpress has this thing called pings. What is that? I can't work out what it does.

From an IT point of view I know what it is to ping an address but I'm not getting it with the wordpress version of it.

 

[JDA]

It lets other sites know that your blog has been updated. The biggest site to ping is probably technorati.

Here's the Wikipedia entry that deals with blog pinging:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping-server

 

[Nathan]

Thanks. How do you activate it? I couldn't seem to work out how to turn it on. There is a link to allow pings but it didn't really say how to connect or use it

 

[JDA]

On the Wordpress dashboard:

Options ---> Writing

At the bottom of Writing, there's a box called "Update services". Whatever's in that box is what you're pinging whenever you write a post.

 

[Nathan]

So this may sound dumb, how do you know the address to ping to? Do you just put in www.technoarti.com and hope thats right?

 

[JDA]

http://www.technorati.com/ping/

Check that page out, most ping services will have a page like that, with info on how to automate it, or you can just paste your site URL in. That gets annoying doing that every time though, its easier to automate it through Wordpress.

 

[Nathan]

Thanks

I honestly didn't know what pings meant. Now I do