Pinging Web Services in Joomla

A lot of people use Joomla as a blog. Now compared to other blogging applications out there it is very powerful, but it is missing a few key features here and there. The key feature that I'd like to talk about is ping services for Joomla. If you use Word Press, you'll know that you can set it up to ping these web services and let them know that there are new posts on your website as soon as your article is published. Now, Joomla doesn't have this built in to it. So, here is how you get around it quickly and easily.

If you don't have a FeedBurner account, register for one. It's a quick and easy way to publish your Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed around the internet.

Use FeedBurner as your main feed subscription for your site and while you're in FeedBurn configuring it to ping your web favourite web services. There is an option under the Publicize tab for your feed called PingShot. This will give your site a kick in the ass and notifiy all of the ping services that you could possibly think of.

The main list of ping services include:

• Technorati
• My Yahoo
• Bloglines
• NewsGator
• Google Blog Search, and
• Ping-o-matic

These are just the default services that are built in to the main part of the feature. Should be enough really. FeedBurner allows you to add an additional 5 ping services to the list from the other choices that they have. If you have Joomla and you have an existing RSS feed on your site and you want to ping all of the web services out there then FeedBurner is the way to to. If you are signing up to FeedBurner or like this article, make sure you sign up for the feed on my Blog too.