Hi, Dawn!

Congrats on the new site! Looks good. (But I swear to God if you get skins working before I do, I am going to be so jealous!) ;)

Okay, pinging is usually a network term and it is used in the context of troubleshooting. Like, if my machine is suddenly unable to surf the World Wide Web, and I am trying to figure out where the break down in communications is, I would use my ping utility to help determine that piece of information. The basic idea is that you are instructing your computer to say hello to a remote computer, and asking for a response in return.

For example, if I go to my command line and type in:

ping www.cnet.com

This is the kind of response I will get if everything is okay.

Pinging home.cnet.com [206.16.0.147] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 206.16.0.147: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=233
Reply from 206.16.0.147: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=233
Reply from 206.16.0.147: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=233
Reply from 206.16.0.147: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=233

Ping statistics for 206.16.0.147:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 102ms, Maximum = 103ms, Average = 102ms

Now, if things are not okay and I type the above command, I will get a different response, such as "request timed out" or "destination host unreachable." By pinging different targets (i.e. localhost, your router, various remote computers) and looking at the results, you can pinpoint where the break in connectivity is.

Hope that helps,

Andrew