publish to your site, they need to subscribe to your RSS feed. Most platforms allow the RSS feeds to be autodiscovered by the various feed readers – that is, the blog reader needs to enter only your site’s URL, and the program will automatically find your RSS feed.
WordPress has built-in RSS feeds in several formats. Because the feeds are built in to the software platform, you don’t need to do anything to provide your readers an RSS feed of your content. Check out Chapter 5 to find out more about using RSS feeds within the WordPress program.
The best way to understand trackbacks is to think of them as comments, except for one thing: Trackbacks are comments that are left on your blog by other blogs, not by actual people. Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? Actually, it does.
A trackback happens when you make a post on your blog, and within that post, you provide a link to a post made by another blogger in a different blog. When you publish that post, your blog sends a sort of electronic memo to the blog you’ve linked to. That blog receives the memo and posts an acknowledgment of receipt in a comment to the post that you linked to. Chapter 10 gives you information on how to use HTML to create links on your blog.
That memo is sent via a network ping – a tool used to test, or verify, whether a link is reachable across the Internet – from your site to the site you link to. This process works as long as both blogs support trackback protocol.
Sending a trackback to a blog is a nice way of telling the blogger that you like the information she presented in her blog post. All bloggers appreciate the receipt of trackbacks to their posts from other bloggers.
Trackbacks aren’t really as popular as they were years ago, but they do still exist and are a tool that some people like to take advantage of. There is an option in WordPress that allows you to turn trackbacks off if you want to; you can find more information in Chapter 5.
Ugh. The absolute bane of every blogger’s existence is comment and trackback spam. When blogging became the “it” thing on the Internet, spammers saw an opportunity. Think of the email spam you’ve received – comment and trackback spam is similar and just as frustrating.
Before blogs came onto the scene, you often saw spammers filling Internet guestbooks with their links but not leaving any relevant comments. The reason is simple: Websites receive higher rankings in the major search engines if they have multiple links coming in from other sites. Enter blog software, with comment and trackback technologies – prime breeding ground for millions of spammers.
Because comments and trackbacks are published to your site publicly – and usually with a link to the commenters’ websites – spammers get their site links posted on millions of blogs by creating programs that automatically seek websites with commenting systems and then hammering those systems with tons of comments that contain links back to their own sites.
No blogger likes spam. As a matter of fact, blogging services such as WordPress have spent untold hours in the name of stopping these spammers in their tracks, and for the most part, they’ve been successful. Every once in a while, however, spammers sneak through. Many spammers are offensive, and all of them are frustrating because they don’t contribute to the ongoing conversations.
All WordPress systems have one very major, very excellent thing in common: Akismet, which kills spam dead. Chapter 7 tells you more about Akismet, which is brought to you by Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com.
Using WordPress as a Content Management System
You hear something like the following a lot if you browse different websites that publish articles about WordPress: “WordPress is more than a blogging platform; it’s a full content management system.” A content management system (CMS) is a platform that gives you the capability to run a full website on your domain. This means that in addition to hosting a blog, you can build pages and have additional features built into your website that have nothing to do with the content on your blog.
A website and a blog are really two different things. Although a website can contain a blog, a blog doesn’t and can’t contain a full website. I know it sounds confusing, but after you read this section and explore the difference between the two, you’ll have a better understanding.
A blog is a chronological display of content, most often posts or articles written by the blog author. Those posts (or articles) are published and, usually, categorized into topics and archived by date. Blog posts can have comments activated, which means that readers of a blog post can leave their feedback and the blog post author can respond, thereby creating an ongoing dialog between author and reader about the blog post.
A website is a collection of published pages and sections that offer the visitor a variety of experiences or information. Part of the website can be a blog that enhances the overall visitor experience, but it usually includes other sections and features that might include things such as the following:
✔ Photo galleries: This specific area of your website houses albums and galleries of uploaded photos, allowing your visitors to browse through and comment on the photos you display.
✔ E-commerce store: This feature is a fully integrated shopping cart through which you can upload products for sale, and your visitors can purchase your products via your online store.
✔ Discussion forums: This area of your website allows visitors to join, create discussion threads, and respond back and forth to one another in specific threads of conversation.
✔ Social community: This section of your website allows visitors to become members, create profiles, become friends with other members, create groups, and aggregate community activity.
✔ Portfolio of work: If you’re a photographer or web designer, for example, you can display your work in a specific section of your site.
✔ Feedback forms: You can have a page on your website with a contact form that visitors can fill out to contact you via email.
✔ Static pages such as a Bio, FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), or Services page: These pages don’t change as often as a blog page does. Blog pages change each time you publish a new post. Static pages contain content that doesn’t change very often.
I include a couple of figures in this section to further illustrate the difference between a blog and a website. Figure 2-4 shows the front page of my personal blog located at http://lisasabin-wilson.com. Notice that the site displays a chronological listing of the most recent blog posts I’ve made. On my personal site, I use WordPress primarily as a blogging tool.
Figure 2-4: My personal blog uses WordPress as a blogging tool.
In contrast, my business
