What to do when Pingomatic goes down

This “pingomatic down” post is (hopefully) one third informative, one third predictive, and one third inquisitive. Pingomatic is the default pinging service used by WordPress and many other blogging platforms to let the world (various aggregators and search engines) know when a new post has been written. A few months ago, at the Future of Web Apps conference, Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress) told us that pingomatic will eventually be shut down.

The reason? He showed us a graph with a very significant upward trend for the number of pings the pingomatic service receives each day. One of the biggest causes of this is the explosive growth of splogs that send millions and millions of “spings” to the pingomatic servers. Obviously this creates a huge server load. Matt and his team have had to keep adding new servers to keep up with the growth, but there is no real way to monetize pinging. The service does not scale, nor is it profitable. Eventually they will have to shut it down.

The inevitable death of pingomatic is one good reason to add more pinging services to your wordpress (or any other blogging) platform. The other? As you ping more services, you get greater exposure (in theory, I haven’t really tried myself). I found this page that has a breakdown of some other pinging services, but it’s from January 2006 so I’m not sure how timely it is. I like it though, because it breaks down which ping services are included within pingomatic. (You don’t want to send multiple pings to services because you might get flagged as a spammer).

What alternative pinging services do you use? I’d like to put together a good list of ping services that are 1. non-overlapping (don’t ping a service more than once) and 2. reliable (do not go down or slow down regularly). I’m hoping to narrow down a good list in the comments. (I might also test out the list form the services above.)

November 27, 2006 · Filed under web 2.0

This site runs on Thesis. Yours should too

Are you a blogger that doesn't understand a lot of PHP? Are you looking for a theme with Flexibility, Easy Customizations, Rock Solid SEO, and Outstanding Support?

If so Thesis is for you. Using Thesis you will have more control over layout and design than you ever thought possible. Simply point and click.

For more advanced users Thesis has an intelligent customization system that uses hooks. Using hooks you can use Thesis across all of your sites and never tell it was the same theme. Watch the Thesis Video Tour.

• Thesis demo site
• Thesis gallery showcase
• Testimonials