wordpress

Daily WordPress Tasks

13 Comments Posted on December 9, 2007May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

When I set up a new WordPress blog, I always set it to moderate first time commentors. It turns out this isn’t something Blogger users are used to. On Blogger you had the choice of moderate all the time, or not at all. WordPress has a lot more options and a lot more control. But this also means you have a few things you need to do regularly – daily at the least. I tend to do these tasks several times during each day.

Daily Task #1 –

Comment Moderation

There’s some very good reasons that you want to have moderation for the first comment someone makes to your blog. You want to stop spammers before they even get started. You may want to welcome legitimate first time commentors by sending them a personal email, and the email you get from WordPress is a good heads up to remind you to do it. It also contains the email address and website of a commentor to make it easy for you to email and visit their site. The email you get looks like this – click for a larger view. You can click for a larger view with most of the images in this post.

There are links within the email you can click as you can see. When you log in to your WordPress Dashboard, you can also see if you have any comments in moderation from that screen.

Clicking on comments in moderation will take you to the moderation queue. It looks like this –

So as you can see in that image there are four options underneath a comment.

Approve will let the comment go live on your blog so everyone can see it.
Spam marks the comment as spam and places it in the Akismet Spam folder
Delete is useful if someone accidentally submitted a comment twice. But remember, NEVER delete spam – always mark it as spam so Akismet can learn to identify it in the future.
No Action means nothing is done and the comment remains in the moderation queue.

Daily Task #2 –

Akismet Spam

Akismet is a wonderful thing. However it *is* open to abuse by bloggers who –

mark comments as spam when they are not really spam
mark comments as spam because they do not like the commentor

It also suffers as a spam filter when bloggers don’t regularly check their Akismet spam trap to make sure everything in there is spam. You do not get an email from WordPress to let you know when a comment has ended up in Akismet.

I believe it is part of your job as a blogger to make sure legitimate comments from your readers aren’t going into Akismet by mistake.

So how do you check it? I normally do it when I moderate a comment because Akismet is in the comments section and if you’ve just moderated a comment you’re already in there. You can see how many comments are in Akismet. Simply click on Akismet Spam and you’ll end up at this page –

Read through the comments. If there is anything there which you do not consider spam – and sometimes there will be, my comments regularly end up in Akismet, I will not speculate as to why! – you simply tick not spam, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click despam marked comments.

If all the comments are spam, you can click on delete all, and they will forever disappear. I find it is easier to delete the spam comments on the spot but you can choose to let them build up and Akismet will automatically delete them after 15 days.

There You Have It –

The above two things are fairly essential daily tasks on a WordPress blog and you may even find yourself doing them 4 or more times a day if you’re near the computer and you get an email to say a comment needs moderating, or maybe if you’re writing a post and you end up back at the dashboard and see there are comments to be moderated.

You Can Choose –

If you want more or less moderation on your blog you can go in and change the options. Go to Options (light blue) –> Discussion (dark blue) and you will see this screen.

It is your blog, and you can set whatever settings you like. The way I set it is simply the best way I have found to manage comments for my blog. Your needs might be different. Just be careful because by making changes to this screen you may be opening up your blog to the spammers.

How Do You Manage It?

Let me know in the comments section how you manage comments on your blog. Do you moderate them once a day or more often? Do you have moderation for all comments? If yes, do you think you could try moderation for first time commentors only? Do you find that you delete a lot of comments from your regular commentors?

Any Questions?

Ask away by leaving a comment!

blogging tips, wordpress, Wordpress Training Wheels

Oh! My Plugins!

7 Comments Posted on December 2, 2007May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

You may have noticed that I put a page up with the list of plugins I use here on the blog.

Advanced TinyMCE Editor

Basically this plugin gives you much greater ability to change the look of your posts than you usually have in WordPress. It contains everything but the kitchen sink – from advanced color picker to add custom characters to tables. The best part is that it is fully customisable – you can remove any of the buttons for things you don’t use regularly. I love it!

Akismet

Akismet is the most well known of the anti-spam plugins available with WordPress. Basically it checks comments to see if they are spam. It takes information from other bloggers using the plugin as well, so spammers are pretty much screwed.

Unfortunately that means it can sometimes get it badly wrong – some bloggers who comment a lot around the place tend to end up in Akismet. That includes me – I’ve had to drag my own comments out of there from time to time. This is not surprising, because not all bloggers are as intelligent as you and I are, and they don’t take the time to visit someone’s blog and see if they are a real person who just comments a lot before marking their comment as spam.

And of course, let us not mention those bloggers who put people in Akismet just because they don’t like what they said in their comment, or they have a personal grudge against that blogger. Oh, we just did. Oops.

Akismet requires a bit of work from me as a blogger, I need to keep a close eye on it to make certain it is not putting legitimate comments into spam. However it does catch a lot of spam too, so it is worth using.

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin helps you when it comes to search engines. I can’t quite explain how but the guys over at the home of the plugin do a better job so visit the site and read about how it works. I like it but sometimes I’m too lazy to write the things myself so that is where the auto generate comes in handy.

cforms II – Contact Forms 2

This is a really important plugin and I highly recommend it. This does everything necessary to allow me to have the contact me page and for the messages sent using that page to get to me. You even have choices with how it looks. Pure brilliance.

Different Posts Per Page

This plugin allows you to set the amount of posts seen on different pages. Oddly enough exactly as the name of the plugin suggests! Go figure. ;) But it works a treat and it is much better than having everything on your blog at the same amount of posts you want on your front page. I have 4 posts on the front page, and something like 25 on all other pages now.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

This plugin basically works like a funnel forcing all options of reading your feeds into feedburner. That’s pretty important. I don’t have the technical terms to explain precisely why. It just is.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin is not just for Google – it creates a sitemap which Ask.com, Google, Live Search and YAHOO can all understand and access and it notifies those search engines when your site is updated.

Lucia’sLinkLove

Ah Lucia, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.. The trouble with being a do follow blog is that some spammy bloggers and spammers in general will drop by and leave a comment just to get a link back to themselves. They might say intelligent sounding things, leave long comments, or they might be lazy and just say “Great Site”. Yeah right. Tell me something I don’t already know! ;)

However if you use Lucia’s Linky Love, you can set the number of times someone has to comment before their link is made do follow. You can choose anything from 3-10 times. It is a great way of rewarding your regular commentors for leaving comments yet at the same time not giving links to spammers or lazy people just trying to build links to their site.

Maintenance Mode

This plugin allows you to put WordPress into maintenence mode if you need to take your site offline in order to update – and it allows you to put a page up to let people know how long the site will be down for. That page can be customized to suit yourself, also.

Very handy, especially if you have a test blog – nobody else can get in there at all, you can have a page that says “This is a test blog, visit the real blog at blahdeblah” yet you can login and work on the test blog.

pMetrics

pMetrics is a stats tracker. They give you a free 30 day trial of their full version tracker. I tried it out and liked it so much I signed up for a year at $19.95. The design of the tracking site is pure heaven on the eyes – it is the best looking tracker I’ve ever seen. Plus, the tracker works ok too! Though no tracker gives you 100% accurate results, this one is reasonably accurate. It has some great options like “spy” where you can see live tracking results from your blog.

Simple Trackback Validation

I’m borrowing the description of this one from the plugin page in my WordPress because it puts what it does better than I can – Eliminates spam trackbacks by (1) checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and (2) by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog.

Sociable – AntiSocial Version

I’m using a hacked version of this plugin created by the great Andy Beard himself called “AntiSocial”. It includes no follow on all the links (to save your link juice for things other than social bookmarking sites) and it also has a few different options within it – for Sphinn and StumbleUpon which are two of my most used social bookmarking sites.

Subscribe To Comments

Enables your commentors to subscribe to comments – this is a wonderful thing. It means often discussions continue on longer than they would without it. And sometimes you will find months later someone will comment on a post and generate a whole new discussion. Brilliant!

TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter

I am seriously crazy about this plugin but The Other Half has modified it slightly so that it works better. The original version looks for certain patterns which are present in a lot of spam emails and it also allows you to put in words often used by spammers to make sure those words don’t get past the plugin again.

The spammers are always changing their methods in order to get their spam past filters like this. I noticed they were using a lot of different mis-spellings for common drugs but the actual URL to their site was always spelt correctly. The plugin did not seem to check URL’s for the often used words. So the other half modified the plugin so that words put in will be rejected whether they are in the comment itself or the URL entered by the spam bot. This means all the drug spam is automatically rejected now. I’ll have to get the other half to write a post on how to modify it sometime.

Between moving to WordPress on October the 9th and writing this on the 20th of November, TanTan has blocked 3631 spam comments. Because it blocks them before WordPress has to deal with them, this has saved a lot of load on my blog. Joe Tan explains a bit more about saving CPU cycles and load on the home page of this plugin, seen below. (the modified version is what you would get on your blog if you hosted with us, it is fantastic)

Where did they go from here?

This shows you where other readers went from the blog post you’re currently reading. At the bottom of any page on my blog below the comment box you will see “Readers who viewed this page also viewed” and then a list of any other pages they may have viewed.

WordPress.com Stats

Another stats tracker. You need an API key from WordPress.com in order to use this one. You can access it from within your WordPress Dashboard, which is very handy. Not that I check my stats anywhere near as often as I used to but I will generally land in there once a day because the stats give you a quick overview of referrers, top posts viewed, search engine terms and outgoing clicks for both today and yesterday. So it’s an easy way to see what is going on with my site at a glance.

wp-cache

Ok so I’m not the most technical of people. Better you read the site of the person who wrote it rather than listen to some garbled explanation from me. But simply put, it caches your blog to make your site faster. It can be really handy for me sometimes when I get a big amount of incoming traffic at once which does happen from time to time.

WP-Polls & WP-Polls Widget

Yay for polls. Basically it allows you to have polls but there’s a lot of functionality within this plugin. It does a lot of stuff related to polls. :)

WP AJAX Edit Comments

Found at one of my all time favourite blogs, the Reader Appreciation Project, this plugin enables your commentors to edit their comments after posting them. I find this to be much better than the “preview comments” type plugins. My commentors have used this option 37 times so far!

Youtube Brackets

Makes it a lot easier for you to embed you tube videos. ;) Read the site below for more info on that.

blog housekeeping, wordpress

A Quick Bloggy Update

7 Comments Posted on October 4, 2007March 19, 2015 by Snoskred

If you commented over the last week, I’ve just finished replying to all the comments. Apologies for the delay – it’s been a huge week of learning WordPress for me.

I have a test blog up and running and it looks fantastic – no, you’ll have to wait till I launch it ya’all! WordPress is much simpler than I expected and after just one day of playing with it I’m feeling very comfortable – and about ready to flick the switch over to the new blog. I’m going to take some time to play with it. I’d say next Monday will be the moving day.

Let me now admit how terrified I have been about this process. Several times over the last few days the voice in my head has been screaming “RUN AWAY run away! Stay with Blogspot, don’t switch to WordPress. You’re not smart enough. You don’t have the technical knowledge for this”. Well that’s a load of baloney. I am smart enough, I do have the technical knowledge. It turns out all my fears were simply because I did not know how things worked – and now that I do, I can honestly say WordPress is simpler and easier to use than Blogger is.

I did not know how easy it was to modify templates – it is a snap. Just yesterday I was considering paying some big money to get my own unique template built. I completely believe you have to invest in your blog and I’m happy to pay for something that is great and that I was happy with and would never want to change. However I can take a good looking template and switch the colors, change the graphics, just tweak it to suit myself.

I was worried about plugins. I was worried about security. I was worried about a lot of things. Now, I have faith in myself that I can deal with whatever happens. Confidence is a great feeling.

Back in a few hours with a CD review. ;)

blog housekeeping, wordpress

Assorted Blog Tip Goodness For Bloggers

7 Comments Posted on August 20, 2007February 28, 2015 by Snoskred

Google, heatmaps, comments and spiders, oh my! There’s so much to know when you’re a blogger, so I keep putting together some of the little tips I am picking up to share with you. Blogger users take note, I have a couple of great ones for you here.

Have You Googled Your Blog Lately?

In order to get specific results for your blog put the following into the search box – site:www.snoskred.org – just replace the www.snoskred.org with your site URL.

If you want to search your own site only, you can also use Advanced Search and put your site in where it says Domain – Only return results from the site or domain. I use this all the time when looking for past things I wrote here.

For those of us getting frustrated with Technorati, it may be time to consider a Google search widget instead. I’m going to be checking further into this later today and may put a how to together for ya’all for future blogging tip goodness posts..

Find Out What Your Readers Click On

I read Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog at Problogger and thought it might be something interesting to try. I put it on less than 24 hours ago and it is already showing me interesting information.

If you want to know more about your blog readers, this is an absolute must do. It is also really simple to do – and completely free!

Don’t Forget

I added a new section to my sidebar called Bloggers Are Helpful. It contains some of the best articles I have found about blogging. It is also constantly updated and in the weekly wrap up I will let you know what new articles have been added to it over the week.

If you have a helpful article which should appear in Bloggers Are Helpful, please email me or leave a comment linking to your article.

Blogger Issues.

Comments Policy.

Did you know you can add your comments policy to Blogger? It will show up just above the box where people enter their comments. Here’s a quick screenshot guide on how to do it.

From your Blogger Dashboard – click on settings.

Click on Comments.

Find the box that looks like this.

Type your comments policy into the box – and don’t forget to click save when you’re done!

Now when your blog readers want to comment, they will see what you typed into the box directly above the comments box. It will look like this –

Or perhaps like this if you have your comments appear in a pop up box.

With Blogger you have a choice between a pop up comments box and a comments page – I prefer the comments page myself, which do you prefer as a commenter? and if you want your comments to be do follow I believe you can’t use the popup box. I’m not 100% sure on that one – anyone?

Where’s That Spider?

You may have read this post by Sephy where he talks about Blogger messing with the search engines. If you did not and you are using blogger, you need to know that Blogger has added a robots.txt file to your blog – without asking you, and without giving you any options of changing it.

What is a robots.txt? It simply tells the search spiders what to look at and what to ignore.

Blogger users are not able to submit a sitemap to Google – something ALL other bloggers can do, because it has to be on your site itself in .xml format and blogger does not allow you to upload .xml files to your blog. Blogger is telling the search spiders to read my feed as my sitemap. That means my feed read becomes my site map. Not an ideal situation at all. :(

Bloggers on WordPress and some of the other blogging platforms have a huge advantage over us – they can tell Google what pages to look at, what pages to ignore, and also get their labels listed.

Get Smart

Therefore we Blogger users will need to become smarter about how we do things. That is what the Snoskred Is section is about.

I only had 297 of my 500 posts on google for some strange reason. Some of my much older posts which I used to get hits for on certain search terms seemed to stop getting those hits.

What I chose to do was take the time to go back through my posts and make a links list with keywords appropriate to the post. I put it in my sidebar. It is long and nobody may ever actually look at it other than the spiders. However I do hope that my readers find it useful as well, if they want to know more about me it’s pretty much all there.

You may want to consider doing something similar yourself. It’s your blog. :) At the very least my thought is that you should have your favourite 10 posts available in your sidebar for your readers to check out and get to know more about you.

Consider WordPress.

I am working on learning a bit about WordPress. I have it installed on another domain I own, and Sephy and I are just messing about with it, learning how it works.

I had been getting mixed messages on WordPress. Some people told me WordPress was difficult to use and for more technical type people. Some people told me it was the best thing since sliced bread. Having now messed about with it I can say both are true. It does require some technical knowledge, but it is also is the best thing since sliced bread.

Blogger is great for most bloggers, I completely agree with that. It is easy, simple to use and you can now get templates for Blogger that look fantastic.

For those of us who want a little more control – who want to be in charge – who don’t want Blogger making decisions on their behalf without asking them – WordPress may be the better option. Will I be moving this blog to WordPress? Probably not at the moment, but maybe in the future. I am going to use WordPress for the business blog, though.

blog template, blogging tips, commenting on blogs, how to guides, wordpress

Snoskred – Life in the Country