** Those little stars **

If you're listed on the UAE Community Blog or a Blogrolling.com user and want to know how to get those *Updated Blog notifiers* (the little stars) to show again, you need to read this!

Over at the UAE Community Blog, there are long lists (known as Blogrolls) in the left and right hand columns of blogs whose owners have requested to be listed there.

To manually maintain these lists by having to type each blog's URL into the UAE blog template would be a nightmare of a job, so the UAE Blog moderators use an application called BlogRolling.com to manage the lists.

We do too - all the links that you see in the right-hand column are managed in BlogRolling.com - no more tedious adding of html to our blog templates everytime we want to list a new blog!

All we now add to our blog template is a string of code provided to us by BlogRolling.com which is the link to our blogrolls that are now managed in BlogRolling.com.

Adding blogs to our blogrolls using BlogRolling.com
To add a blog to our lists is now simple. When we see a blog that we want to add to our Blogrolls, we click the Blogroll It! (a plug-in available from BlogRolling.com) link in our browser links bar.

The BlogRoll It! Plug-in as it shows in our browser


This opens a window which lets us log into BlogRolling.com and add the blog to the list in which we want it to appear. Refreshing our blog page then shows the blog added to the list - it's that easy!

The window which opens into BlogRolling.com so that we add a new blog to our blogrolls


Updated Blogs Notification
A really useful feature of BlogRolling.com is that you can activate a setting which will notify you of when a blog on your Blogrolls is updated.

On the UAE Community blog, you can tell which blogs have been recently updated by the addition of a little * beside the name of the blog.

The UAE Community Blog has chosen to show 1 * beside blogs which have been updated


On our blog, we can tell which blogs have been updated by the addition of ** (2 stars) beside the blog name, as that's what M has chosen as our notifier.

Pacific Islander (Pandabonium and Momo) and Rod Drury have new posts!



It's not working!
Sadly and alas, the automated Update notifier for Blogroll hasn't been working properly, so unless you're using an RSS feed or another option such as Bloglines to keep tabs on updated blogs, it's been difficult for us BlogRolling.com users to know which blogs have been updated.

However!
I've noticed that the manual Pinging feature in BlogRolling.com still works and this will activate the Updating feature.


What's pinging?
Pinging is when you send a trigger message to a site like Technorati, BlogRolling.com, Feedburner etc to tell them that your blog has been recently updated. In turn, this updates their info to include your recent posts.

BlogRolling Pinging
BlogRolling has their own form to fill out which is available on their website.

BlogRolling's ping form and, circled in red, the link from their menu to get to it


Ping-o-matic
Or you can use a generic Ping form such as the one from Ping-o-matic which will then notify a whole lot of Blog aggregators that your blog has been updated - including BlogRolling.com!

Ping-o-matic's ping form - select the sites that you wish to notify about your updated blogs and do them all at once!


For blogs listed on BlogRolling.com-generated blogrolls, using the Pinging services will then activate the selected updated symbols whenever your blog is updated, such as on **ours** and the *UAE Community Blog*.

It's a good workaround until BlogRolling.com can fix their automatic pinging.

Now let's see how many UAE Community Blog members read this blog and start to manually ping!