The RSS Blog

Last week, I was talking with Coolz0r about Blogosphere ping and how it's completely broken (another discussion). Coolz0r thought it was working for him, but then I showed him how Technorati actually picked up his last post about 10 hours after it was originally posted. I asked Coolz0r how he pings Technorati and he told me that he use the manual ping form. I then explained to him how PingShot would ping 10 ping sinks on your behalf, without you requiring to do any additional work. I also realized that not everybody knew about this and a small tutorial started writing itself in the back of my mind.

I'll assume the reader does not have a FeedBurner account. If you already have an account, then skip to step 6. If you already have a FeedBurner feed, then skip to step 11.

1. Goto FeedBurner [http://www.feedburner.com].
2. Click on the Register link (top right).
3. Fill in your desired User, Password, your E-mail Address and optionally the Secret Question and Secret Answer.
4. Click the Sign In button (bottom). You are now registered.
5. Skip to Step 7.
6. If you are not already signed in, then sign into FeedBurner.
7. FeedBurner will now ask you for the URL of the feed you wish to burn.
   
   Enter your RSS feeds URL and click Next.
8. FeedBurner will ask you to confirm that you want to burn your feed. It'll also check the URL to make certain it's a valid feed. Click the Activate Feed button when you are read.
9. Congrats, your feed is now live. You can add different options to your feed by clicking the Next button or simply click the Skip directly to feed management link to continue with this tutorial.
10. Skip to Step 13.
11. If you are not already signed in, then sign into FeedBurner.
12. Click on the Feed Title you want to activate PingShot with.
13. Click on the Publicize tab.
14. You'll see the PingShot service in the left sidebar. Click on the PingShot service.
15. Finally, we arrive at the PingShot service.
    
    Enable as many ping services as possible. I suggest Feedster, IceRocket, Weblogs.Com and Blogdigger as they are major search engines that can get you a lot of hits.
16. When you are finished selecting your ping services, click on Save or Activate.

FeedBurner will automagically check your feed every 30 minutes and when it changes, it'll automagically ping the ping sinks you selected. You know longer have to do that yourself. BTW, Ping-o-matic is also a ping source and it will ping several other ping sinks, maybe even redundantly.