When you publish a blog, you want to make sure people know you have added a new post. One way of doing this, is by pinging a blog directory service. You tell this service that your blog was updated, and then it gets listed in the directory of recently updated blogs. There are dozens of pinging services out there and it is too much of a hassle to ping them all manually. Some blog software offers automated ways of pinging services (like one of the Nucleus plugins does) which saves you some time. If you don't have that option, or if you want to ping more then just a few services, you probably have to manually ping them. Which means going over to the site and entering your URL to tell the service your site was updated.

Pingoat pings a whole bunch of services for you. Enter the URL of your blog, and possibly that of your feed, and select services to ping. Bookmark the results page and reload it next time you update your blog to ping the same services again. A similar service is Ping-o-Matic, which also lets you bookmark a pinging page.