A Consuming Experience

Blogging, internet, software, mobile, telecomms, gadgets, technology, media and digital rights from the perspective of a consumer / user, including reviews, rants and random thoughts. Aimed at intelligent non-geeks, who are all too often unnecessarily disenfranchised by excessive use of tech jargon, this blog aims to be informative and practical without being patronising. With guides, tutorials, tips - and the occasional ever so slightly naughty observation.

Add this blog to Del.icio.us, Digg or Furl | Create Watchlist for this blog

Add this blog to my Technorati Favorites!

Feedburner feeds: pings for changes in your feed

Saturday, September 24, 2005
Deutsch | Español | Français | Italiano | Português | 日本語 | 한국어 | 汉语

Add this post to Del.icio.us, Digg or Furl | Create Watchlist




If you use Feedburner for your blog feed, you should turn on Pingshot, a new service introduced yesterday by Feedburner: "When you use the new PingShot service, we will 'ping' a collection of services that you choose whenever we detect that your feed has new content."

To do that just login to your Feedburner account and click Publicize, then select Pingshot (on the left). I've ticked everything on that page (PubSub, Ping-o-matic, Newsgator) and clicked on the "Add one" dropdown for "up to four additional services" and added as many as I could. They only list 4 anyway so I added them all - Feedster, Icerocket, Weblogs.com and Tailrank (plenty of time to check occasionally in future if new ones have been added and if I want to change my list).

While you're at it you might select Awareness API on the Publicize pages too, and turn it on - "The Awareness API allows developers to build applications that can display, analyze and promote your feed's traffic data outside of FeedBurner". I've not had a chance to look into how much that's being used by external developers, but I figure it can't hurt.

I really like Feedburner. Their free service is extremely useful and well thought out and the support is excellent - friendly, helpful and prompt - especially on their support forums; and they keep improving their service and features all the time. This is the way a Web service should be run, and I hope they continue to go from strength to strength. Nope, I don't have shares in the company - if only!

(By the way, I'm assuming most people know about feeds generally - I've been thinking of doing a really basic "ground up" post on feeds and your blog, Feedburner etc. If that's something that would be of interest to you please let me know by a comment or email and if there's demand I may rustle something up.)


Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,



Links to this post on:

  • Icerocket -
  • Blogpulse
  • Bloglines
  • Delicious
  • Google Blog Search -

Create link here by posting on Blogger



4 Comment(s):

Please do an rss feed post. Since discovering them I have become addicted to them. I would like to know as much as possiblke about them :)

(By quaisi, at Saturday, September 24, 2005 12:54:00 PM)  Edit Comment

OK quaisi, thanks for the feedback. Added to the queue!

(By Improbulus, at Friday, September 30, 2005 11:05:00 PM)  Edit Comment

Lovely thing you mentioned this great news from Feedburner! As Ping-O-Matic is included in the standard set up, I reckon most of what need to be pinged will be pinged but I added the (now) FIVE optionals as well. Cannot hurt. I've read somewhere that many services rely on Weblogs so it could be a good thing to tick it.

Ping-O-Matic by the way gave me strange errors most of the times so I turned to King Ping instead. Much easier. http://kping.com And no longer necessary I guess.

About Feeds: I don't want my blog entries distributed in full, just a truncated version. Feedburner does it for me but the raw feed (atom.xml) from blogger than anyone can figure out or search for at Syndic8 are displayed as full text feeds by some services - bloglines for example - but on the other hand that service messes up posts with images.

--> Something about how to make a really good feed and validate in and all that stuff would be great if you would like to dig into if you love thatkindastuffa.

W3c validation or what it is called... when I read google treat your site better if you're technically correct I wanted it. Run my URL through a validator. Got hundreds of errors that I don't understand. Choice: become a developer, ignore it, wait for improbulus.

Hacking: how to turn OFF word verification in Blogger for a) my own comments on my own blog, and b) for trusted visitors

While we're at the topic "Everything you wanted to know about blogging and are not afraid of asking Improbulus about"... how about telling us something about WordPress and Moveable Type and Type Pad - whatever they are called - so we know where to look first and what to look for when we set up our next blog.

I really wish we were neighbours, I'd bring my laptop every time I pretended I need a cup of sugar!

Many thanks for all information.

(By ritzy, at Saturday, October 01, 2005 9:49:00 PM)  Edit Comment

Thanks for your comments Ritzy and you're welcome. Yes I agree, no harm to ping a few extra...

Interesting about Ping-O-Matic. I confess I don't ping much these days except Google and the automatic Weblogs ping that you get with Blogger - seems to work fine.

You can truncate your raw Blogger source feed in your site feed settings. And yes, a post (or more) about feeds is high up on the list!

Validation generally is added to the queue, OK...

As for the word verification, don't know about that. Have you tried Blogger forum? My hacking skills are minimal though slowly developing!

Wordpress etc - all in the queue, probably Wordpress first once I have the time to have a play!

Just as well we're not neighbours or I'd run out of sugar, eh? :D

(By Improbulus, at Friday, October 07, 2005 3:01:00 PM)  Edit Comment

Post a Comment | | Subscribe to all comments on all posts


| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »