Thank you for the link,
Brian. I still don't get it though... do sitemaps work on blogger blogs?
To ping I use
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/alertping.html and it works fine. Google is indexing my posts the second day - almost real time

I use google alerts to see how I'm doing, whether my posts and articles are being indexed and where.
I have no idea how much traffic I get - I do have a PR2 - that's not much, but I was rather lazy and didn't post much... Oh, that reminds me: I should post today.