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 Google Base and it works for a year without problem. Now, Google Gadgets do not recommend to host gadgets at Google Base anymore because we have Google Code. 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 Sugree's Gadgets.

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 Ping 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.