The problem with running a service like Ping-O-Matic is that sometimes you have to send emails like this:
To: [...deleted...] Subject: Re: pingomatic > Hi! > > I have tried to ping pingomatic for about 2 days now > but it will not work for me. . [...]
I may be a little late coming to this party, but Google has introduced Google Blog Search, which limits searches to just blogs (well, in theory, anyhow). The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that GBS provides the search results for your terms as Atom and RSS feeds.
It seems that Google is leveraging blog feeds to get structured data, and monitoring ping sites for timely updates. This is something that lots of people speculated about way back before Google bought Blogger. [...]
Hot off the presses is the release of WordPress 1.5.1. There is a Changelog available on the Codex which gives some highlights, a full list of submitted bugfixes on the mosquito bug tracker, and even more pedantic changeset details in the repository.
Here are some of the main new features/fixes that matter to me:
One thing that’s neat about the extended ping support: For each server in your “Update Services” list, WordPress will first attempt an extended ping, and if that fails it will fall back to a standard ping (we aren’t the first to do this). [...]
Ping-O-Matic is one year old today. To think that my lowly little service pinger, originally created to help me gain an edge on BlogShares, is all grown up and sending out approximately 1 million pings per day! We’ve sent out pings on behalf of over a half-million individual blogs, and over 85 thousand in just the last week.
I haven’t been able to give PoM as much attention lately as I’d like. I still have lots of ideas that I want to implement, but it’s just hard to find time to do it, between the dayjob, the new house, spending time with the wife and kids, and preparing for the upcoming baby. [...]
After months (and months, and months) on hiatus, GeoURL.org has returned. The service is now run by Ask Bjørn Hansen. It appears that it’s been back up for about a week, and they’re still kicking out some kinks. Once the dust settles, we’ll add it back to Ping-O-Matic.
As suggested by a thread in the WordPress Support forums, I want to share some Thank Yous…
This list is not comprehensive, I’m sure to leave out plenty of people who deserve to be included. So if you aren’t mentioned, please don’t feel slighted — it’s just my lousy memory at fault. That said, I’d just like to list some people (in no particular order) who have contributed to my enjoyment of blogging. It might be via code, documentation, or just some thought-provoking writing.
Extreme technical blogging geekout zone ahead!
blo.gs: hook up a cloud
the old cloud service that operated via rebroadcasting pings over HTTP is being phased out. it is no longer documented here, and will be shut down at the end of 2004. (also, the changes.xml files will also no longer be available after 2004.)
I’ve been using the blo.gs changes.xml file for a while to track recently updated sites in my blogroll. So now I have four choices: 1) implement this new cloud interface. 2) switch back to the old weblogs.com changes.xml file. [...]
I’m back. Did you miss me?
I didn’t think so.
Anyhow, ever since Feedster announced their new ping interface earlier this month, we’ve been getting requests to add them to Ping-O-Matic. Matt contacted them to make sure that they wanted us to start bombarding them with our pings, and they said ‘okay’. . [...]
Over on the Ping-O-Matic blog pinger, I’ve added the A2B Location-Based Search Engine as a new service on the ping form. This will replace the old GeoURL service, which has been AWOL for quite some time now. I also did some other minor maintenance, mainly adding NewsGator to the manual ping form, and updating the sidebar links to reflect the most recent service changes.
WordCamp Birmingham 2009 Recap
As mentioned previously, I gave a presentation on Jumping into WordPress Plugin Development. [...]