RSS for Beginners
The purpose of this page will be to explore the following concepts; Category / Tag, RSS, Subscribe, Feed, Ping, Technorati.
All of these have to do with making blog posts (and comments) available to whomever may have an interest in the topics associated with the post. Some of my information will be WordPress specific, since I’m using WordPress and may not recognize that the information doesn’t apply generally.
Category / Tag: One or more categories can be applied to a post to designate its subject. Visitors of your blog can search for posts that have a specific category. Blog search engines, like Technorati use the WordPress categories as tags.
RSS: RSS is an acronym for several possible terms, one of the more popular is really simple syndication. An RSS is an XML file that contains the “codes” for the newest posts and / or comments on your blog. I believe that this is the file that a blog search engine reads to get the updated information about your blog. There are RSS links on a WordPress blog for Entries and another for Comments.
Subscribe: To enter the link to the RSS XML file in an RSS Reader. After this is done, the RSS Reader will periodically check the link for updated content.
Feed: Don’t really understand this!
Ping: A ping is a message to a blog search engine that tells the search engine that there has been an update to your blog. WordPress defaults to using pingomatic.com.
Technorati: A blog search engine. It is automatically informed of changes to your blog by pingomatic.com.
Conclusion: After a couple of posts it appeared that pingomatic wasn’t signaling technorati. I changed the Options / Writing to do http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping instead of the pingomatic. The next post was picked up by technorati correctly. I think it is working correctly now.