KMpings is dead, long live del.icio.us/tag/km!

Posted on May 27, 2005 by David

Long-time readers of this blog may remember and have participated in my little trackback experiment called KMpings. This service allowed people to send trackback pings of their KM-related posts to KMpings, which then syndicated the whole list for anyone who wanted to subscribe. It was a bit of a hit in a micro-community of KM bloggers although the activity slowly tailed off over time.

A few months ago I made some changes to the site that ultimately disabled the service and it is now completely gone with the redesign of my main web site. If you found the service useful and/or want somewhere to send your KM-related pings, I recommend using del.icio.us KM tag from now on. I subscribe to the KM tag stream from del.icio.us and find good stuff in it pretty often.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the KMpings experiment! I had no idea when I created it that it would be used as much as it was or that it would last so long.

KMPings: How To

Posted on May 8, 2003 by David

I’ve had a few questions lately about how to create a service such as KMPings in MovableType. The basics are pretty simple:

1. Set up a category in MT and enable Trackback pings. Note the Trackback URL that should be used to ping the category.

2. Put the code below into an index template in the MT template library. Edit the category name to match the one you want to use. Only index pages update on ping so you have to do this to show a current listing without manually rebuilding the site.

3. Publish the url that people should use to ping the category.

That’s it!

Stand Alone TrackBack

Posted on August 28, 2002 by David

Ben and Mena have release a stand-alone version of TrackBack.

With this you could create ping repositories without some of the minor kludge work arounds you have to do within a full-blown MT blog (such as I had to do with KMpings).

It also gives people using other blog software the ability to integrate TB into their own blogs if they can support perl cgi scripts on their server.

Nice innovation!

xml Headaches on KMpings

Posted on August 26, 2002 by David

I just went through and cleaned up several ampersands from KMping entries that were breaking the RSS newsfeeds. If your reader barfs on malformed xml, the feed should start working again for you.

Please be sparing in the use of ampersands if your blog software doesn’t escape your text properly. HTML entities are your friends!

New KMpings Posters

Posted on August 8, 2002 by David

Welcome and thanks for participating to James Robertson and Anders Jacobsen who have recently begun sending KM-related TrackBack pings to KMpings!

Be sure to check out Blogpopuli for a similar site that tracks entries related to blogging (plenty to track around that topic).

TrackBack Code for Radio

Posted on July 21, 2002 by David

Ron Lusk has posted the code he has developed to configure Radio to ping entries to KMpings. This code could be modified to ping any TrackBack-enabled site. Way to go!

KMPings Trackback Code
KMPings code is located at
http://home.netcom.com/~luskr/weblog/radio/code/pingKMPingsForPost.txt
Treat it gently, it’s young and naive. It is intended to ping only for posts in the “K-Log” category, and is set to use the test URL for now.

User Error

Posted on July 17, 2002 by David

Sysop error actually. In an effort to clean out the test page pings on KMpings test page I accidentally dropped all the pings for both the test page and the main page. That is what I get for manually tweaking the database without backing up the data. I have saved the last version of the RSS newsfeed from KMpings that has the old entries before the little database accident.

Sorry about that everyone. Please feel free to reping your entries if you want to get them back on the page.

Google Has KMpings Results Now

Posted on July 16, 2002 by David

David Watson wrote about his irritation at Google autoforwarding when you get no search results for a particular word and google thinks you spelled it incorrectly. He used ‘kmping’ as an example. Google always wants to change kmping to camping.

At least now there are some entries in Google for it! No more auto-forward. The actual KMpings page is not yet in the results, oddly enough, but I suppose it will get in there eventually. I guess most people are linking to people talking about KMpings rather than linking to KMpings itself. Meta-popularity or something.

KMPings Bookmarklet Generator

Posted on July 14, 2002 by David

I have created a KMpings Bookmarklet Generator for those users whose software doesn’t support TrackBack yet. This allows anyone to ping an entry to KMpings no matter what software they are using.

I adapted the bookmarklet generated by Movable Type and hit the ping script directly from the bookmarklet. Kind of an ugly little hack but it works! Let me know if you have any feedback about the tool.