Have You “Ping” Lately?

by Steven Sentosa on May 8, 2010

Ping…..? What’s that? That might be your first response when you read this post. Ping services are very useful to notify the whole world that your blog exist. I usually ping after I put a new post on my blog. WordPress actually has its own “pinger”, but it doesn’t hurt to boost that “ping” activity with some third-party service, right?

I recommended you to use http://autopinger.com. It is a one-stop ping service which allow you to ping to many different sites and content aggregators, such as Technorati, Syndic8, Google blogsearch, and many more. The advantage of using ping service like this is that you don’t have to ping all of those content aggregators one by one. You can even setup an account with them so that Autopinger will do the service automatically for you.

As you can see Autopinger.com has quite a few services to ping to. What impressed me was the fact that they also put the health of each service there. It is to let us know, from all the pings that were sent to them, how many of them that were actually successfully sent. If you subscribe with them, they can actually ping other websites for you automatically when they noticed new content is available from your site.

“Ping”-ing should actually increase your web traffic because it means that your website is getting more exposure in the blogosphere. The more exposure you get the more likely people will find you, either through RSS syndication or search engine result. Search engines, like Google, could also crawl your site sooner since it found many links from the content aggregators about your site. So, why don’t you do it? It’s easy to do and won’t take you long to do it.

Does “ping”-ing help your website traffic/exposure? Please share it in the comment section. For me, it lowers the gap time between the time when I posted something until Google actually crawls it, so it increases my site traffic from the fact that people can find my content faster.

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I just found this neat trick that you could use when using WordPress picture gallery in your post. For example, you uploaded these pictures to your post.

However, you want to feature one picture in one spot of your blog post, and the rest in another spot. Before, I don’t know how to do this. Everytime I use the picture gallery, it seems that I have to include all the pictures in my gallery. Apparently, the developers for WordPress have figured out that the need will arise when you need to exclude some pictures from the gallery.

For example, you want to exclude the picture of the shop, or the fourth picture from the picture gallery. You just have to add [exclude="pic-id1, pic-id2, and so on"] to your picture gallery HTML code

[gallery link=”file” exclude=”311″ columns=”4″]

and this is the result

Unfortunately, I haven’t found the easy way to get the picture ID. The only way, that I know of, where you can find the picture ID is by going to your Media Library and click “Edit” on the picture you want to exclude. In your address bar, the URL will then show the picture ID. In my case, the URL is “…/wp-admin/media.php?action=edit&attachment_id=311″, so the picture ID is 311. If you have several pictures you want to exclude, find the IDs of the all the excluded pictures and put them inside the “exclude” tag separated by comma, ex:

[gallery link=”file” exclude=”311, 309, 310″ columns=”4″]

Also, you might want to check WordPress Codex: Gallery Shortcode for more tags you can use in your picture gallery HTML.

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Free PDF: Build Your Own WordPress Site

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