Ping-o-Matic and Site Fix

First off I wanted to let everyone know that the Ping-o-Matic XML-RPC interface is up and running. So to ping all those services with one fast and automatic step, follow these instructions:

  1. Login
  2. Go to Options → Writing
  3. Erase anything you may have in “Update Services” and just put http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
  4. Watch how fast your posting goes

Pinging multiple update services is often the slowest part of any blogging system’s posting, and we’ve designed the pingomatic interface to be as fast as humanly possible. Try it out.

I also wanted to thank Robin Millette for tracking down the CSS that was causing several versions of Mozilla and Firefox to slow to a crawl and often crash on this site. I was perplexed because the markup and CSS validated, and I couldn’t find what could be causing such a bizarre problem. Robin tracked it down to a duplicate body selector that wasn’t really needed so I removed it and the problem seems to have gone away. It was obviously a bug in Mozilla’s rendering engine but it seems to be fixed in the newer versions already. Mozilla bugs like this are so rare I was sure it was a problem with the site.