Upon publishing a new post on a WordPress blog, the platform automatically pings most important services that supports this feature. How can you make sure that the operation was indeed successful and people can search for your post ? Which other update services do you recommend adding to the default wordpress list ?
use statpress, usually it will report the bot that coming to your blog. Also feed rss will be hit if it was successful
Easiest way is to take a sentence from your article and then put "" around the sentence and then into google. If google shows result for that sentence then it has been distributed correctly. Example: "I like the nanny because it is a fun show to watch though it is old but I also like Two and Half Men as well with Charlie Sheen since he is a great actor and fun also in Hot Shots 1 and 2 long time ago," If that was a sentence in your article - and if your article had been picked up correctly - then google will show 1 or more results for that search. That is the best way to check the result of your article.
I have submitted my blog feed to some rss directories ... but nothing shows up yet. I guess it takes a while. Also, being an WordPress blog, the ping feature should have done something.
Just submit it and forget it. It will eventually be crawled by all of the major feed aggregators. Don't drive yourself crazy checking every single one to see if your blog is there. Spend time on your content, design and Google SEO
You really don't need a big huge list. If you ping 5 individual services, that will pretty much take care of your circulation. You can add to the ping list that is already with Wordpress and I seriously doubt that you notice any change in anything what so ever. This is an old concern that is no longer an issue.