Sundance

Important updat - 7th October 2007

If you are using a recently downloaded version of windows live writer the information in this post is no longer valid. Please read this post for an easy walkthrough to setup newer versions of Windows Live Writer for Drupal blogging.

Hi, the great ping debacle goes on. It seems that drupal will only ping if a cron run reports new content on the frontpage. Which could account for the lack of pinging I experienced when I put new content on the blog pages only (i don't particularly want all my blogs to be posted to the front page, although I suppose from an SEO perspective it is not a bad thing - dynamically changing content etc).

Earlier I was trying to see if I could make the ping module work and I have to report that my experiments have been inconclusive.

I searched through weblogs.com massive database of recent pings but found no sign, and google blog searsh dfinitely didn't pick me up. In the end I manually pinged several servers using www.pingates.com, which I found to be excellent.

Immediately many servers spidered my site. Now, five or more hours later the post has turned up in google blog search. So, the next plan is to check if this post manages to get there just with drupals ping module alone.

I have been pretty successful in installing Drupal. The last hurdle is to understand this Ping module.

Obviously it is designed to ping various sites to notify of changes and updates. It seems to be configured to ping a site called www.pingomatic.com which in turn pings the other major ping servers, such as weblogs.com etc.