Here I Am, World

You've found a tool to generate your web content, and you've made the decision about full content versus excerpts, feed type, and whether you're going to be podcasting or not. You know where to look for feeds to subscribe to, and you've picked your aggregator to manage your subscriptions. Now, how do you let people know about your feed?

Again, as mentioned earlier, you or your tool should provide an autodiscovery link for each feed you support. With this, most tools can find and subscribe to your site immediately. You can also provide a link in your sidebar (or individual post for comments), though this approach is falling out of favor; after all, when you click on the link, you get XML, which is not humanly readable.

But how do you let people know you've updated? Well, many aggregators will automatically test your feed once every specified time period, usually no more than once an hour, no less than once a day. But most aggregators are dependent on being notified, and that's where the concept of pings comes in.

Popular ping services such as weblogs.com and blo.gs have web services that can be invoked by your tool to add your weblog to those in the recently updated list. An advantage to this is that any tool that monitors these services then knows you've updated. A downside, though, is that nefarious types such as weblog spammers use these lists to troll for innocent weblogs in which to dump spurious and usually offensive "comment spam."

Other services, usually blog search engines, provide ping capability and then use this information to access your feed to update their databases.

There is a master ping service, Ping-o-matic, at pingomatic.com, which can be customized to ping only specific services, and then can be invoked manually or included in your tool. Most popular tools, such as Movable Type, TypePad, WordPress, and others, automatically ping Ping-o-matic for you.

Most importantly, you need to ensure that your feed is working properly. Again, anytime you make a change in feed options, run your feed against the Feed Validator at feedvalidator.org. This will validate any of the three types: just pass in the URL of the feed.