Bloglines ping service

I’ve been using Bloglines ping service for some time now and I have to say that it works very well. What’s a ping service? Well, it’s one of those little new technologies that helps you bring audience to your blog posts faster.

Here are the instructions for the lucky users of WordPress (things couldn’t have been easier):

1. Open your administration interface
2. Click on ‘Options’ menu
3. Click on ‘Writing’ menu
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page
5. Add http://www.bloglines.com/ping URL to the ‘Update Services’ field.
6. Click on ‘Update Options’ button

You’re done. From now, every time you post new entry to your blog, your WordPress will notify Bloglines about it. Bloglines will fetch your RSS feed, parse it, and incorporate your new post into its archives. It will take from a few seconds to a minute or so.

Why is this important? Well, whoever is subscribed to your blog’s feed via Bloglines will immediately notice the update. They won’t have to wait until Bloglines decides that it’s about time to fetch your RSS.

As a result, the period of time between you posting and the world knowing about it will get much shorter. You’ll start getting comments to your entries minutes after you posted, not hours, or days.