Here is a tut for people who want to update their friend list as their friends update the blogs.

This tutorial is only for the people who use WP. This doesn’t mean that your friends have to use WP in order to update your friend list. I had searched a lot about it and have gone thru WP forums, found bits n peices and combined them. I have been using it since a few weeks now.

Most of the blogs ping all or some of these sites. Pingomatic.com is a site which is devoted to ping all the sites which keep track of the blogs. So u have to ping only one site (i.e. pingomatic) and it pings to other sites.

You can either ping to pingomatic manually by logging onto pingomatic.com or u can use wordpress’ feature to ping pingomatic automatically when u post. It is a default in WP, but if you want to check if you are pinging or not or if you don’t ping and want to ping then…

Go to ur Admin Control Panel > Options > Writing

Look for “update services” and enter http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in the text box. You can also add other sites to ping if you want, but then your post will take long time to publish/save (coz it ‘ll ping all the sites)

Letting world know that you have updated your blog was easy. Now the question is how can we make our list such that it updates the blogs by itself?

1.) FTP or SSH to your blog and follow the path /wp-content/
look for a file called links-update-cache.xml

Note that there are 2 files in the directory with similar names one is link-update-cache.xml and other is links-update-cache.xml (notice the s in links). We need to Chmod (or change permission) of the file links-update-cache.xml to 766 (may be 666 will also work, but I dunno Y I did it 766 for mine)

2.) Log on to your WP’s Admin Panel > Links > Link Categories

Now change the sort order of the category you are using to list other bloggers to “updated”

3.) Log on to your WP’s Admin Panel > Options > Miscellaneous

Look for “Track Link’s Update Times” Check the checkbox present on left side of the text.

To enter “Update file” you will need to have an account at a site like blogrolling.com or blo.gs. I use blo.gs to update my blog (they update about 10 blogs per sec – amazing).

Create an account there, add your friend’s blogs to your list @ blo.gs (just search for their your friend’s url and if it has it in the database, it’ll show it).

Then click “share” on the right side menu (on blo.gs) and copy paste the url for the file favorites.xml. It should be something like this http://blo.gs/_Some_number_/favorites.xml

Now enter this url (with http://) to “update file” on your Admin panel just below the checkbox u checked b4.

It is upto you, how u wanna fill the rest 4 options,

The time format is the time (and date) format shown as the title (tooltip) of your friend’s link on ur site. I have it as “F j, Y g:i a” (without qoutes, it is default)

“Prepend updated with” means what do you wanna put before the recently updated link. I have “< em >” (without spaces) you can put bold or whatever you want.

“e with” is the text you want after the recent link. I have “< / em > (New)” (ofcource without spaces)

The last one “recent” if it has been updated in the past” doesn’t work for me, it remains 60 minutes, no matter what I put 120 or 10. It just remains 60. Dunno if its just me or its smthng wrong with db @ default wp.

Now you can notice that the sort order of that category would have had changed on your blog and if you mouseover, it should show the date and time the blog was last updated. It is possible that some of the blogs show accurate results but some not. In that case just wait till your friend updates his/her blog again. If it doesn’t work at all, then either you skipped a step (or did it wrong) or I messed up in this tutorial. So just let me know if something is not clear or missing. (I am week in english, but I still know that weak is spelled as weak, that was intentional.)

If you think its really a cool thing, let me tell you it has some disadvantages:

1.) If your friend(s) do(es) not ping to blo.gs or any other site u r using, then it won’t update it. But these days generally blogs do ping them and if not, you can always refer your friend to this post :p.

2.) Some blogs (like blogger) sometimes keep pinging these sites for no reason, which means that your friend’s blog hasn’t been updated, but it shows that it did.

3.) You have to maintain 2 parallel lists, one on your site and another on that site. I changed Govind’s new link on my blog, but didn’t change it on my blo.gs list, so it didn’t update it and I thought Govind doesn’t ping. I searched for his new site and indeed he pings blo.gs.

4.) I can’t think of any right now.

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