Pinging and Why Everyone's Doing It

If you've blogged for any length of time, like an hour, you've probably come across the term "ping" somewhere out there in the blogosphere by now, or else right in your own blog dashboard. For instance, Blogger gives you the option in the Settings > Publishing tab to send pings to Weblogs.com, which tracks updates to blogs on a near real-time basis.

But I'm already getting ahead of myself - what are these "pings" exactly? A ping is a digital signal (in XML-RPC format, if you care) that your blogging platform or another pinging piece of software can send out on your behalf each time your blog has been updated with new content. Pings are typically used by blog and RSS search and tracking services like search engines, news and RSS aggregators, and RSS feed generators and managers like FeedBurner. So they're a pretty hot commodity for services that want to make sure they're including the latest blog content as soon as it's been published. For example, following a ping, a blog search engine will know to send its crawlers through your blog to index your most recent post for its search results.

Pings also allow these blogophilic services (yes, I just made that term up) to allocate its resources wisely: if there's no ping, they'll assume there's no new content, and will send their crawlers to go index some fresh content instead rather than recrawl what's already in their database.

For you, the blogger, this makes pings a very good thing. Lots of sites out there are just waiting to receive them, eager to include your blog's content prominently in their search listings or RSS feeds. And pings are free to send and can either be sent automatically, or in mere seconds via a manual pinging service.

What's a manual pinging service? Well, one limitation of some automated pingers, like the built-in one in Blogger, is that it doesn't ping all the sites out there that are waiting to hear from you. So there's a need for services that can send multiple pings en masse to many ping-hungry sites at once. All you do is enter your blog's name and URL, select the sites you'd like to ping, and the pingers will do the rest. Here are three well-known ones for you to try:

Ping-O-Matic
PingOat
Blog Flux Ping Service

Let the pinging begin!

Key terms: ping, pinging, blogflux, blog flux, pingomatic, ping-o-matic, pingoat, pingout, ping oat, ping out, send pings

Stop Blog Comment Spam with Word Verification

As I just discussed in my post about comment moderation, blog comment spam can be a real problem for bloggers trying to maintain a high standard of content quality and prevent unwanted posters from clogging up their comments with commercial pitches for their own spammy sites. In addition to enabling content moderation, another useful feature that can help stop comment spammers is word verification. Most reputable blogging software should provide this option; in Blogger, it's available in the Comments section of the Settings tab in the blog dashboard.

What is word verification, exactly? It's a feature that forces all commenters to enter a word or a random series of letters presented in an image file each time they want to post a comment. If the letters aren't entered correctly, the comment can't be posted. By placing the letters inside a graphic file rather than as standard HTML text, the verification feature prevents them from being read by automated scripts often used by comment spammers to post comments on thousands of blogs at once. If the spam software can't read the letters, there's no way it can post a comment. This is a quick and easy way to stop lots of automated spam bots that would otherwise start dumping unwanted crap in your comments.

Of course, an unusually dedicated comment spammer will actually take the time to enter the comment manually, read off the letters and submit their comment by hand. That's why you need comment moderation switched on as well, so you can individually review each comment that's posted.

The big question in the future will be whether spam software can be programmed to read the letters in those image files. In my opinion it's really a question of when, rather than if, this is going to happen. In the spam arms race, clever coders are always at work trying to crack the latest obstacle to them launching an avalanche of spam (a spamalanche?). When the incentive is big enough - and the ability to comment on thousands of blogs for free is a pretty big incentive - someone's eventually going to figure out a way to do it. But for the time being, word verification should do the trick and stop most automated content spammers. So make sure it's switched on!

Key terms: word verification, verfication, verifcation, automated, comment, spam, script, software, spammers