374 CHAPTER 13 INTRODUCING WORDPRESS Blogrolls: Blogrolls (Web site builder)
374 CHAPTER 13 INTRODUCING WORDPRESS Blogrolls: Blogrolls are a convenient way to manage lists of links to other blogs and sites. These lists can often be displayed on your blog in a sidebar on the page. The links are usually to the blogs that you read regularly. Links to other blogs are often reciprocal: You link to me, and I ll link to you. Getting your blog onto many people s blogrolls is good promotion for your blog. Blogrolls can be served from external sites. Some blogroll services will integrate with most blogging software, whether or not it supports its own blogrolls. More sophisticated services and some blogging software allow you to maintain multiple list of links. Thus, you could have separate categories of links, for example. Ping Notification: With ping notification, your blogging software reports to a central service each time you create a new post. The central service then displays a list of recently updated blogs. This allows people to check in with the central service and find blogs that have been recently updated. Most blogging software supports pinging one or more central services. Many services are available, some offering quite sophisticated features. Some services maintain blogrolls, automatically marked to indicate which ones have been updated. The most famous recently updated ping notification list is probably the one at Weblogs.com (http://weblogs.com/). This originally listed only Radio UserLand blogs (it is owned by the same company), but now lists any blogs. One service, Ping-O-Matic (http://pingomatic.com/), when pinged by your blog software will ping dozens more services for you. Thus, you don t need to wait for your software to support all the services out there. Blog Crawlers: Blog crawler services function in a similar fashion to ping notification services, but visit blogs that don t have the ability to ping the central service. They watch for changes to these blogs and update the recently updated listing as appropriate. These services cater to systems that don t ping and to homegrown or hand-edited blogs. Metadata Services: Several new services receive pings from recently updated blogs and also actively crawl through those and other blogs, and then collate the data they ve gathered in interesting ways. For example, they might list the most popular subjects about which people are currently blogging, the most talked about book, or the most popular blogs (based on which blogs everyone links to). TrackBack: TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between web sites. If, for example, Anne has written a post on her blog that is a response to or comments on a post in Bob s blog, she may want to send a TrackBack to notify Bob. This is a form of remote comments. It is a way for Anne to say to Bob, This is something you may be interested in. To do that, her blogging software sends a TrackBack ping (a small message sent from one web server to another) to Bob s software. Pingback: Pingbacks are similar to TrackBacks, but were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with TrackBacks. The most notable difference between the two is that Pingbacks do not send any content. Pingbacks are generally displayed with a blog s postings comments. Both TrackBacks and Pingbacks allow a form of cross-blog communication, so the various readers of blogs that track and ping back each other can participate in a multisite conversation.
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