Ping behavior question

  • Resolved theglobalguy

    (@theglobalguy)


    18 years, 8 months ago

    I use my site as more of a travelogue than a day to day blog. When I’m on the road I often write quick articles that are pretty unpolished and rough. Later (months later in some cases) I like to go back and update them with photos, better text, and just generally improve the writing.

    When I edit an older post, I know that WP generates a ping to pingomatic, or whatever services I’ve got listed. My question is, does this ping contain a pointer to the actual article I’ve edited, or does it just say that the site has been updated?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Volunteer Moderator

    18 years, 8 months ago

    The ping just says that your site has been updated. Your RSS feed contains the time and date stamp of each post’s most recent edit. The pinged service then compares these time and date stamps with what they have on file as your most recent update. If any of the time and date stamps are more recent than what they have on file, your blog, or the specific post(s) containing these more recent time and date stamps will be marked as updated. So, from a certain point of view, the update service does all the hard work. Your blog simply states the facts, and the update service determines what has and has not been updated.

    Thread Starter theglobalguy

    (@theglobalguy)

    18 years, 8 months ago

    Thanks Macmanx, that was exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Of course that leads to a follow-up question about best practices for RSS feeds. If I’m changing an older post that’s dropped off of the RSS feed, then the update service still won’t know about it.

    Is it considered polite to keep your RSS feed as small as possible, or can I include the last year of posts in it, (maybe 20 articles)? I supposed I can keep the volume of traffic down by just including the exerpts in the feed, instead of the entire article.

    Is there a “standard” for RSS publishing?

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Volunteer Moderator

    18 years, 8 months ago

    If I’m changing an older post that’s dropped off of the RSS feed, then the update service still won’t know about it.

    Exactly.

    Is there a “standard” for RSS publishing?

    No, not really. I have seen feeds as small as 5 articles and as large as 50. As for using excerpts, that’s more of an ethics question. There are quite a few bad individuals out there who steal RSS feeds and display them on their blog as if they were their own posts. The logical solution to this, of course, if to run your RSS feed with excerpts (thus removing all hyperlinks and HTML formatting, and requiring the reader to visit your post to read the rest of it). The other solution is to publish your feed as full text (which includes hyperlinks) and use this plugin: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugin-to-automatically-add-copyright-message-to-your-rss-atom-feeds/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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