Pinging as it relates to blogging is like raising your hand and saying "hey, I'm over here, please come and checkout the updates I've made to my blog".
The actual ping is a program that sends a XML formated text message verifing that your URL exists and that it is capable of accepting requests. After receiving this message the target site sends out a "spider" that "crawls" your blog. The spider is another program that reads and searches your site for new content.
You can manually send a ping to a site each time your blog changes but using a Ping Service such as Ping Goat or Ping-O-Matic allows you to ping multiple directories at once by simply entering your site's name and URL and clicking go. It's that easy.
Pinging really does help increase your traffic and should be done any time you add a new post to your blog.
Feb 15, 2007
What is Pinging?
Feb 7, 2007
HTML Tips
There are a couple of self closing HTML tags that I use all the time. One is the line break <br/> which drops the text or image down one line. Although it's not recommended, you can place several line break tags together in order to create white space between items such as photo's.
Another tag I like to use the horizontal rule tag <hr/> This tag creates a line across the page in the element you place it in, such as:
Right Here
You can also control the line width and color of the HR tag using CSS atributes in your style sheet.
hr {
border-style: solid;
border-color: red;
border-width: 2px}
By placing the above CSS in the style section of your template any horizontal rule you created would be red and two pixels wide.
Technorati Tags: html tricks, horizontal rules, line breaks, blogatech
How to Create Tabbed Menus
For those of you that have asked about the tab menus you see at the top of the page. I created them from found code snipets and images I created. I hope to post a tutorial on how its done in the near future but in the mean time you can find a good "how To" here.
