Urgh ... boodebr.org wasn't talking to pingomatic, leaving me effectively "off the air" for the last couple of weeks. I had assumed that the point & click magic of Drupal was doing its thing and never checked till today, when I noticed that technorati hadn't updated me in a while.

Turned out that the problem was (obviously) that I didn't have a site slogan!!

There is a check in the ping module, in the function "ping_cron()":

if (variable_get('site_name', 0) && variable_get('site_slogan', 0))

In other words, if you don't have a site name and/or slogan, then it will never ping pingomatic. I don't see why a site must have a slogan ... but anyways, removing the check made ping happy and I'm back on the air