Team, I'm late to the blogging software game so don't know the whole
story, but Apache Roller presently provides users two ping-related tabs:
1.) "Common Ping Targets" set up by the blog administrators. Individual
bloggers are welcome to disable or enable whichever ones they want.
2.) "Custom Ping Targets", or those targets not set up by
administrators. Individual blog owners can identify their own ping
targets and activate them here, good just for the blog.
I don't think ping targets are nearly as important today as they were
several years ago, before Google became GOOGLE. Nowadays, you just blog
and set the correct META description elements, and in a few days Google
has your blog entry and returns it to web searchers. I never hear
people talking about ping targets today (and three out of the four
targets we presently support OOTB appear to be really minor websites),
they're primarily concerned about SEO and getting to the first page of
Google returns.
If I'm correct that ping targets are falling in importance, I wonder if
we should scale down and simplify Roller's functionality in this area,
namely move from two tabs to one with respect to ping targets. One
solution could be discontinuing the custom ping targets page, for the
few individual bloggers caring about a new ping target, he can just ask
the blog administrator for him to include for all bloggers. There
probably aren't many additional ping targets beyond the four that Roller
5.1 already offers OOTB anyway, and arguably an administrator should
have to manually approve a ping target before it can be enabled. WDYT?
Cheers,
Glen
- simplify ping target maintenance? Glen Mazza
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