As you may already know, I wrote 3 Google Gadgets for a year as follows.

1. Yahoo! Weather
2. Ping-o-Matic
3. Overture Keyword Selector

At that time, all these gadgets are hosted at and it works for a year without problem. Now, Google Gadgets do not recommend to host gadgets at Google Base anymore because we have . As a result, hosting gadgets would be easier than ever but existing users must change its URL manually. To make my gadgets to continue working properly, I registered a new project at Google Code. It is named .

Hello sugree, I was fiddling with the drupal ping module that comes with the install and I could not get it to work at all. I get the "fsockopen(): unable to connect to rpc.pingomatic.com:80 in C:\Programme\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\Drupal\includes\common.inc on line 322." error along with "Failed to notify pingomatic.com (site)" in my logs. I saw your posting saying that technorati does not recommend pingomatic anymore because of downtime. Then I saw your patch for 4.7 at http://drupal.org/node/11148. Does this solve the problem? Does this allow the drupal ping module to work?

As you see after pinging to Ping-o-Matic, the service give a string which is almost unreadable at all. Below is a sample taken when pinged this site.

qbznva-va-qo | uggc://jjj.ubjsbetr.pbz/ || hfrentrag-ecp | Zbmvyyn/4.0 (pbzcngvoyr; ZFVR 5.0)

Another useful tool for bloggers is service. Basically, blog could be updated more often than usual web pages so you have to notify something every time you updated a blog. This mechanism is called "Pinging". There are so many Ping service on the net. One of them is Ping-o-Matic which actually, is a proxy to multiple Ping service. Once you pinged to Ping-o-Matic, the ping request will be forwarded to multiple Ping service simultaneously.