Repost: Pinging

Pre-repost comment:  The stuff below probably no longer applies.  That was about the Blog.com posting, y’know?  But I want to re-post everything, so…  (Also, I don’t know how to change font colors on this site.  A couple of the spots below were originally different colored text and underlined so they looked like links.  I don’t seem able to underline here, either…)

Aug 27: Pinging?
Okay, so at the bottom of each entry of this blog is the following:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Edit this entry.

So what the bloody heck is “pinging”? I’m not entirely clear what an “RSS feed” is, either, but “pinging”…that’s the one that really mystifies me.

Though, also, I’m starting to worry that I ended up picking a blogging host that no one else uses. Every time I click on “Visit Random Blog” in my menu at the top of the screen, most of the time I end up with something from ’11 or ’12 that looks like it was auto-generated in another language and then badly translated. Or I get something in Spanish or Portuguese, still from ’11 or ’12. Once in a while I see one from ’13, but…yeah, it’s looking like I made a bad call here.

I mean, it’s not like I’m really looking for feedback or anything, and yet…there is kind of a sense of frustration, too. I can’t even put a simple counter on the screen to find out if anyone’s visiting the pages without signing up for something from Google, and that really doesn’t seem like it would be worth the hassle.

I need to look into this later and see if I should move to another host. Because if no one else is using it, it might go down at any time, right? In which case, everything would be lost and pointless and whatnot.