kfitz

An Open Letter to All Those Blogging Folks I Love to Read

George recently issued a plea for bloggers to make full-text RSS feeds of their sites available, such that folks who, like him, are hooked on Bloglines and other newsreaders can properly keep up. I’ll confess to not having checked out my feeds to see if they’re full-texts or not, since the migration, but I promise to do so right after I issue my own plea:

Dear Folks I Read Regularly (Which Category Includes Pretty Much Everybody Listed Over There on the Left):

See how in my blogroll some links have little dashes around them, and others don’t?

The ones that either right now or otherwise sometimes have dashes are the ones that ping blogrolling.com when they update. The little dashes let me know that there’s recent content, and that I should go check it out.

Unfortunately, many of you don’t ping blogrolling.com on update. What this means for me, personally, is that I never really know if you’ve updated or not. Without that indicator, I sometimes forget to check.

Yes, I could go the George route and switch over to a newsreader, which would keep me abreast of new content as it rolls in. But I’m personally addicted not simply to your sage words, but also to the look and feel of your site, and so prefer to read at the source.

Please, then, do me the enormous service of setting your blogging software up to ping blogrolling.com when you update. In Movable Type, this is a piece of cake: under “Weblog Config” click on the “Publicity / Remote Interfaces / TrackBack” link, add http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ in the text box, and save your settings. In ExpressionEngine, go to “Default Ping Servers” under the Admin panel, and make sure blogrolling.com is there — and then make sure that the box is checked on the “Edit entry” page when you update.

Everybody else, alas, is on their own — but it oughta be pretty easy to figure out.

Remember, whether you blogroll or not, pinging blogrolling.com lets those of us who do keep up with your always intriguing work. And no, I’m not just sucking up.

Your pal,

KF

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