What happens is you can’t login, or, if you were previously logged in, you can’t mange plugins. All you can do is get a blank white screen.  Even the WYSIWYG editor would not load.

I think what it had to do with automatically updating pugins in Wordpress 2.6  I don’t know why, but it made Wordpress very unhappy.

Lucky for me, I had all the plugins backed up and was able to delete all my plugin files and re-upload the old ones.  Yes they are all begging to be upgraded again, but the blog is working and that’s much more important.

Thanks to Get Found Now for writing about the issue.  Their article lead me to my own conclusion that worked.

Wordpress 2.6 comes with a feature that adds captions to images.  It looks really nice in the Wordpress editor, but if you don’t have the code, it won’t look as nice when you publish your post.

The good news is, all you have to do is add the following lines of code to your theme’s CSS file.

/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions */

Now your images and captions will look just as good live as they do in the editor.

Blog #1 - The iFrame - The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load.  It seemed abnormally long.  I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.

When the did finally load, it then asked me if I wanted to run a Java applet.  Huge red flag there.  It took some digging but I found a lot of files contained some iFrame code that was loading badware from an external site.

To fix, I deleted and re-uploaded all the files I could, and walked though each theme and plugin file to find any traces of code that should not be there.  Once cleaned out, the site ran much smoother.

Blog #2 - Hidden Random Links -  With this blog, Google actually caught the issue first.  They put a lovely note on search results that said the site may be unsafe to visit.  Even when someone did click on the search result, Google sent them to a warning page.  So not cool, but understandable.

I immediately looked though the theme files and re-uploaded any admin files with no luck.  Oddly enough, the issue presented itself only on a few posts, not all pages.  This means that the issue was not part of the theme or any other main files.  The badware was actually embedded in individual posts.

Using Google Webmaster Tools, they listed out a number of infected pages.  I then viewed the sources of those pages and was able to see an empty link that went out to a known badware site.

To fix, I edited each post with WYSIWYG editing turned off.  This allowed me to see the raw HTML and it was easy to see the infected posts.  Within a day or two of cleaning up the code, Google cleared the warning message.

Blog 3 - Spam Links - If you’re not running the most recent version of Wordpress, you may become affected by old security issues.  With blog #3, someone added a couple hundred invisible spam links to the footer of the site.  We were lucky with this one as a visitor tipped us off early.  The fix was simple, remove the links from the footer file and update to the latest version of Wordpress.

Hack Attack Tips

If you do find your blog has become infected, here are a few things you should always do.

1. Clean up any infected files as soon as possible.  It’s your reputation and your visitors safety at stake.
2. Delete any blog and plugin files you can and re-upload new ones.  Don’t get rid of your configuration or theme files though.
3. For those files that you can’t just delete (like config and theme files) open each one and check for issues.
4. Update your blog software and plugins to the most recent version.  The newer the files the safer they probably are.
5. Change your passwords. Your blog user, your ftp and any others you can.  You never know how hackers get in.
6. Backup everything.  In the three cases above, no files or information was deleted by the hackers, but that doesn’t mean they will always be as nice.

Hackers are out there every day doing what they can to harm innocent sites.  You can take steps to protect yourself by keeping your blog software and plugins up to date and creating good, strong passwords along with frequent backups.

Do you have any words of wisdom to share about keeping blogs safe?

You can protect comments with a captcha plugin, Spam Karma or Askimet, but what about trackbacks?

Lately I’ve been testing out the Simple Trackback Validation plugin. It checks two items to ensure that the trackback is legit.

1. It checks the page that claims to be linking to your post to ensure it does.
2. Checks the IP address of the blog the tracback is coming from and the IP of the trackback. They should be the same. In order for these to be different, a spam bot must be auto generating the trackbacks.

It also has a feature to toss any questionable trackbacks into moderation.

So far in my testing I can’t already say if it’s working or not. No trackbacks have gone into moderation, yet trackback spam seems to be more under control, but not gone.

Askimet also claims to filter out trackback spam, but in my experiences, it’s not as good at it as filtering out comment spam. Then again, maybe it’s blocking a lot of items that I don’t even know of.

What I’d love to see is a plugin that made all trackbacks go though the same rules as comments or even just throw all of them into moderation. Content scraping sites give trackbacks a bad rep and I’ve yet to find a solution to really get trackback spam under control.

What have you tried? Have you found a solution that works and works well? If so, please do share.

Prerequisites:

• FTP access.
• Blog admin access.
• 10-30 minutes for most blogs. This is also dependent on how big the blog is and how many plugins the blog has. Webhosting and internet connection speed can also play a big part.

Notes:

• No other authors should be in the blog during the upgrade. If they are, it probably won’t hurt anything, but they’ll be confused as it won’t work correctly.
• Not all plugins are always compatible with newer versions of Wordpress; especially when it’s a larger update. It would be a good idea to visit each plugin’s homepage to ensure it’s compatible. Wordpress also tries to keep a list, such as the Wordpress 2.5 plugin compatibility list. If a plugin is not compatible, either wait to upgrade until after the plugin is updated, or find an alternative.

Upgrading:

1. Backup your blog’s database. Grab the Wordpress Database Backup plugin and use that to run backups via the Wordpress admin. It’s simple to install and easy to use.
2. Backup your blog’s files. The most important files are config.php and the wp-content folder. However, it never hurts to have a backup of everything in your blog directory.
3. Update any plugins. Check out your plugins page and see if any say that an update is available for any active plugins. If there is, upgrade them. If you are unning a version that doesn’t give plugin update notifications, then you can click on the plugins name to go to their homepage and see if an update is available.
4. Deactivate all plugins. Each and every plugin should be turned off BEFORE upgrading. It may also be a good idea to keep a list of what was activated if the blog has active and inactive plugins.
5. Download the latest version of Wordpress and un-zip the files to your desktop.
6. Rename wp-content to xwp-content in the files we just downloaded in step 5. We don’t want to upload the new wp-content folder, but in case we accidentally do, it’ll have a different name so we won’t overwrite the original. The wp-content folder contains the blogs look and feel along with any uploaded images.
7. Log in to the blog via FTP.
8. Delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folder. Upload the new wp-admin and wp-includes folders from the Wordpress files that were downloaded in step 5. Granted, you could just upload the new folders over the old and just replace files, but deleting them first will remove any un-necessary file that may not be needed after the upgrade and it’ll help ensure there are no upgrade issues.
9. Upload the remaining files (except for the wp-content, or xwp-content, folder) from the Wordpress files that were downloaded in step 5. Each one of these can just overwrite what is already on the site.
10. Go to: YourBlogURL/wp-admin/upgrade.php and click ‘Upgrade’. Follow the on-screen instructions. Wordpress will do the rest.
11. Clear your browsers cache. This will make sure that your browser isn’t loading any old files from it’s memory.
12. Go back and re-enable the plugins we disabled in step 4.
13. Test the blog. Click around, leave comments and just make sure everything looks, and works, as good as it did before the upgrade.
14. ENJOY!

Out of all the blogs we manage, and all the upgrades we’ve done over the years, no major issues have ever come up. Usually it’s a plugin issue if there is a problem and just de-activating it clears everything up. However, if something does go wrong, having a complete backup of the database and files is extremely important.

I’ve you’ve got anything to add to the list, or any questions, please post them in the comments below.

Here are a few of the modifications made to the post screen. Under the image is a listing that describes each number call out.

1. New menu layout. Main menu options are bigger and on the left. Secondary options smaller and on the right. They are all still there though.
2. The post window is basically the same, however they did add in a media bar. The media bar lets you post audio, video, images and other sorts of media. The image uploading is now up here too which makes it much more convenient. This is a great addition for all content publishers.
3. There is also a new ‘Fullscreen‘ button that allows you to maximize your post writing area to use your whole browser window. I’m currently in love with this feature.
4. Tags are still below the post and now get add one at a time instead of in a comma separated list.
5. The categories have been moved quite a ways down under the post. Not sure why, but I guess the idea is you work your way down the main column.
6. Publish status is now a nice drop down menu. You don’t have to change it to publish though, just hit the publish button. The ‘Publish and Continue Editing’ button is gone now. Since it auto saves, that functionality is not needed.  Plus, the save button brings you back to the post which is nice.
7. The timestamp is also under ‘Publish Status’. By default it’s set to publish immediately. Or you can hit the ‘Edit’ button to change the day and/or time. This is much upgraded for the checkbox functionality in earlier releases. I know quite a few people who’d change the time and not check the box. This is much nicer.
8. Post Slug is now cleverly hidden away until needed. Put in a post title and it’ll show up right under the title box. This shows a direct correlation to what is entered into the title box. If you want to edit it, juts click on it and it’s editable. Hopefully this will help users avoid long and ugly URLs.
9. Additional ‘advanced‘ options such as custom fields, comments, password protection and author are located lower on the post screen. Since they aren’t used as often, they are listed lower on the page.

Overall, the same options still exist, it’s just taking a few minutes to get use to the new screen. Once you do, you’ll love the new look & feel and layout.

There are also a lot of other fun updates and I continue to run across them. So far, I’ve not seen any issues and am very happy with the Wordpress udpate!

What questions do you have about Wordpress 2.5?

Have you upgraded? If so, how was your experience? Any plugin issues?

Update: I’ve upgraded two blog so far with no issues.  Many more are scheduled.

1 - Write posts that are conversational and something that people can relate to. If you write posts in a way that there feels like there is no room for discussion, then comments will be harder to get.

My wife is great at making posts people can relate to. She put out a post two years ago when she broke her leg and is closing in on 1000 comments from others that have broken theirs. She’s not a marketer, or a PR person, just an average blogger who happened to write in a way that people felt compelled to comment.

2 - Invite comments. If you put out a top ten post, or go off on a rant, ask uses what they think. Literally put at the end of the post “Do you agree?”, “Do you have any tips to add?” or other questions that are inviting comments.

3 - Make it easy to comment. Don’t ask your users to login, don’t make it difficult to comment via complex spam plugins or anything like that. Make sure the comment box is easy to see and that the fields are big enough to put meaningful comments in. Sometimes comment boxes are so small, visitors are to annoyed to comment.

To test this out, log out of your blog and act like a normal visitor and comment on one of your own posts.  Some never see what’s wrong as they never look through the users eyes.

4 - Post one side of a story. If I post about how great one political candidate is, there are many others to follow and tell me how wrong I am or why their candidate is better. This is true in most any industry. I could say Blogger is the best blogging platform ever and I’m sure someone would disagree.

5 - Don’t be mean to those that do comment. Yes, some comments you may not agree with, but be open and willing to accept other thoughts and views. If you are mean to those that comment, no one will want to comment. Meanie.

6 - Moderate comments. Yes, we want to be open and happy to get comments, but that doesn’t mean we want spammy, off topic or just plain mean comments. Delete what is not on topic, edit or remove any inappropriate comments and just keep an eye on what’s happening on your site. After all, is is your site.

Comments not only make the blog owner feel better, but it also makes the blog look more interactive and popular.

As a bonus, comments are indexed and used by search engines and help the page rank. My wife’s 1000 comments are what help her continue to get the amazing exposure. Sure, her post was good, but now she has 1000x the amount of content thanks to the comments.

So what are your tips for getting comments?

Step 1 - Install iWPhone. This plugin and theme combo automatically detects the iPhone or iPod Touch and serves up a specific theme optimized just for those screens. All you have to do is install it and activate it. When an an iPhone or iPod stops by, your site will be ready.

Step 2 - Install iPhone Mobile Admin. This plugin re-works the admin side of your blog specifically for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It makes it quite handy if you have one of these devices and want to login and post or manage your blog on the go. It should work with other mobile phones too if you don’t have an iPhone. There is also WPhone if iPhone Mobile Admin doesn’t fit your needs.

Step 3 - Create a Webclip icon. This is the icon that will show up if someone adds your blog (or website) to the home screen on their iPhone or iPod Touch. If you don’t have a webclip, it’ll just grab your favicon and scale it up and make it look pixley and ugly.

That’s it, your Wordpress blog is now optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s cool again and you can brag that you are on the cutting edge of technology even without an iPhone.

While you are at it, you might want to optimize your blog for all mobile phones too.

Updating your blog’s plugins can give your blog a few advantages:

• Additional features if the plugin is a major update.
• Security fixes.
• Optimized plugin code that runs faster and more efficient.
• Better compatibility with the blog software or other plugins.
• Better compatibility with third party sites if it’s part of another service.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t update your plugins as it’s quite hard to keep them up to date; especially if you have a lot of them. Some plugins have update notifiers in them, others now tie back into Wordprss.org to look for updates. But that’s just the update notification, they all require some time and effort to download and update.

De-activing plugins is a lot easier, unless you actually have to modify the code, and doing so has its benefits.

• It can speed up the blog as it has fewer scripts to run or plugins to load.
• Helps avoid conflict between plugins.
• Can help page rendering time if that plugin use to have to rely on a third party site to run properly.
• Less for you to have to worry about updating in the future.

Checking out BloggerDesign, I found more than a few things to get rid of. First to go were all the analytics code. Performacing, Wordpress.com, Feedburner and 103Bees stats code was all removed. Google Analytics sill remains, but I didn’t think I needed five stats accounts running when really, I was only checking one often. I also removed four other plugins and upgraded eight.

Take the time once a month or once every few months and audit your blog. What plugins were cool at the time, but now you don’t use? What plugins to you rely on, and are they up to date to ensure proper functionality? Taking care of all aspects of your blog can make it easier on you and your visitors.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

If you are viewing this in a feed reader, please visit the blog post to vote. 

There are a number of ways that people can come across you and your blog posts. Here are just a few.

1. Search Engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are constantly looking for new content to crawl and rank. Ensure your site is search friendly and submit an XML sitemap for faster indexing. Before you know it, the search engines will start bringing traffic.
2. Tagging Engines - Sites like Technorati have blog searches that focus on serving up content based on what categories and/or tags you’ve used with your post. Ensure you’re using good categories and tags for additional exposure in tagging sites.
3. Blog Sites - Technorati, Google Blog Search and community sites like Topix all index blog sites specifically and use those posts to feed their content. No websites allowed, only blogs.
4. Feed Reader Suggestions - Rojo and Bloglines have the ability to share or suggest feeds based on what the user is already subscribed to.
5. Social Networks - If you have a Facebook, MySpace, MyBlogLog or one of the many social bookmarking sites, included your feed in those sites to gain a bit more exposure.
6. Social News Sites - If you spent a lot of time and have one great post, it may be a candidate for Reddit, Digg or Mixx. Or maybe one of the many Pligg sites that are popping up.
7. Social Bookmarking - From Furl to del.icio.us there is no shortage of social bookmarking sites. Bookmark a few of your best posts to gain exposure in those areas. Just don’t over do it by bookmarking everything.

There are lots of people out there looking for good content. If you’re writing quality content, then getting visitors shouldn’t be to difficult, but it may take time. The more you write good content, the more visitors you’ll attract too.

There are ways to get visitors that are active and passive. Whichever way you choose to go, keep notes of what worked and what didn’t. That way you figure out where your time is best spent to get the most quality traffic in the future. Plus, as your blog grows, the amount of active blog promotion you do may decrease as your user base may do quite a bit of the promotion for you.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Once you’re signed in, you can create your custom ShareThis button. Choose colors, social media buttons, icon and email feature. It’ll then output a piece of JavaScript to put on your site and start tracking right away.

The nice thing about ShareThis is it only takes up a small amount of screen space. Once the link is clicked on, the larger window with all the options shows.

Other social bookmark plugins have the same functionality but lack the tracking piece. It’ll be interesting to see how this works as it gets more users.

Another option that ShareThis has is the ability to incorporate a ShareThis button directly into your browser. Clicking on it will give you all the social media options and allow you to easily submit any page you navigate to to one of many social media sites. The button comes in the form of a Firefox Extension, Internet Explorer addon or even a bookmarklet for other browsers such as Safari and Opera.

Downsides to ShareThis is that you’re limited to the number of social services available. It has all the main ones but some users may want more. This is kind of a good thing though as to many options can be overwhelming for some visitors. You’ll also have to figure out where you want to add the code in your template. I’m not a huge fan of where I put mine, but I’ll test it out for a while. It didn’t work as well where I wanted it but that’s a design issue I have to work out. It does seem to take up more room that the old ShareThis button use to.

ShareThis looks to be a very useful addition to any blog, website or browser. It’ll help make your posts easier to promote in the social space and additional exposure is always good.

At first, I was a little nervous of All in One SEO Pack. The title of the plugin sounded a little egotistical. However, I tried it out and have been very happy with it.

All in One SEO Pack has a few great features. The first is re-arranging the title tags so that the post title comes before the blog name. You can also put in custom title tag templates for the homepage, posts, categories, archives, tag archives, pages and search pages. Or, you can write your own title tags per post.

In the past I used Optimal Title, which was nice, but you couldn’t have custom title tags and you had to modify the template to make the plugin work. It simply just put the post name before the site name. Then I switched to SEO Title tag.

SEO Title Tag is a step up from Optimal Title as you can customize title tags for every post individually. It also has a really nice mass customize area where you can change multiple title tags at once. However, you still have to modify your template to make the plugin work.

With All in One SEO Pack, there is no template modification needed. Just activate the plugin and it works. It’s missing that mass edit mode that SEO Title Tag has, but the additional features make up for that.

Additional features in All in One SEO Pack include meta descriptions, keywords and nofollow tags.

For meta descriptions, I was using an old version of Headspace2 to auto generate them. Now I can get the same functionality without the additional plugin by using All in One SEO Pack. If you’d like, you can also customize your meta descriptions per post.

The nofollow feature is kind of handy. You can check a box to put nofollow tags on all the archives or tag pages or category pages. This can help cut down on repetitive content that’s fed to search engines.

At the moment All in One SEO Pack is my title tag & meta description plugin of the moment. However each plugin author is working hard to out do each other. Even when writing this post I see that Headspace2 has got a lot of new features that sound pretty darn cool. Can it out perform All in One SEO Pack? I’ll have to test it and find out.

What plugin are you using to create search friendly title tags and other SEO functionality?

An easy way to add polls to any Wordpress blog is via the WP-Polls plugin. WP-Polls is an Ajax plugin that allows a site owner to create as many polls as they want and easily integrate them into their posts.

Some features of WP-Polls include

• Unlimited Polls
• Allows user to select more than one answer.
• Tracks IPs so no one can vote more than they are allowed.
• Poll start and end dates & times. Optional ‘No end date’ also available.
• Styling of poll bar to match with your site.
• Sorting options for poll answers and results.
• Customizable Templates
• Stats & More.

How do you use WP-Polls?

First, ensure that the WP-Polls plugin is installed and running on your Wordpress blog. You can tell for sure if you see the Polls menu option in the main menu after Options.

If installed, click on the Polls menu item and you’ll be brought to the manage polls screen. If you have other polls setup, you will get an overview of them all here along with some stats.

Next, click on the Add Polls sub menu link. Here you can put in your question and the answers. If you need more answers than two hit the Add Answers button and a field will magically appear. Then edit any of the any additional options for multiple answers and start/end date and hit Add Poll. That’s it, your poll is ready to go!

How do I put a poll in my post?

WP-Polls makes adding a poll easy. First you must know your poll ID though. The ID can be found on the Manage Polls page in the first column.

If you are using Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor, WP-Polls adds a nice icon to the toolbar. Click it and it’ll ask for the poll ID. Then it’ll insert the poll wherever your cursor is. As soon as you publish the post, it’ll automatically show up.

If you’re using an editor such as FCKeditor or a desktop application, you can still add polls buy using the following code: Just put your poll ID where the 1 is and you’ll be good to go.

Adding a poll to your Wordpress blog is quite simple and something that can get a good deal of information out of your users. If you want to know what your users are thinking, just ask them.

Having tested a handful of WYSIWYG plugins for Wordpress, the best one I’ve come across so far is FCKeditor. FCKeditor replaces Wordpress’ current editor with one that has a lot of additional features. To make it even better, it even writes pretty clean code.

Additional features, besides those found in Wordpress, include:

• Font face, sizes and colors.
• Its own built in image uploader along side of Wordpress’.
• Flash capabilities.
• Post Templates.
• Paste from Word & Paste plain text buttons.
• Find and Replace
• Forms
• Subscript and Superscript text.
• Link Anchors
• Custom Smilies
• Special Characters
• Page Break
• Custom Styles
• Tables
• & More

Another great feature is the full screen editor. Hit the button and your whole browser window turns into the editor for maximum screen writing space. I think I’m going to keep it installed just for this feature.

The only downsides I currently see is that it will show both the FCKeditor and the Wordpress editor when writing a post. I think it’s a minor bug and doesn’t seem to bother anything. After further investigation, I only see this on my home machine, not on my work machine. Odd.

It also doesn’t interface with other plugins like CForum or Polls. If you manually put in the code that is needed, it still works, but the buttons don’t show up in the editor.

If you feel the need to add in more formatting to your posts, grab the FCKeditor and give it a go. It may be just what you’re looking for.

I’m still looking for the best WYSIWYG plugin though. I have checked out a few others including xinha4wp which was nice, but isn’t up-to-date for Worpress 2.3 yet and wysiwygpro looked sweet, but was $54.

I can’t say that I’m 100% satisfied with any WYSIWYG plugins yet. FCKeditor is by far the most feature packed and user friendly one I’ve come across though. Have you found any good ones?

Categories are the different areas of your blog. They are the sections that you want to break your blog into. Categories will continue to gain more and more posts over time as you post on them often. Think of them like the main services or main product categories on a website.

If you have a site all about sports, your categories may be: Football, Baseball, Golf, Basketball and Hockey.

Tags are words or phrases that are specific to individual posts. They are items that will give the post additional exposure. Tags differ from categories as they are words or phrases that are less often used.

Example tags for the sports site, on a golf post about the Tiger Woods video game, may be: Tiger Woods, EA Sports, Playstation 3, PGA Tour, XBOX, Wii, Video Game.

Tags and categories are very similar in nature, however categories are meant to be the high level, overarching areas of your blog. Each category will contain many posts on one topic. Tags are assigned on a per-post basis and are words or phrases specific to that post and that may only be once in the entire blog.

Whether you use tags or categories, you can’t really go wrong. Both are organizational features and both will gain additional exposure in search engines. What’s important is that you are using them to organize your posts and increase the usability of your blog.

1- What name did the commenter leave? Was it Sam or Jill? Or was it Used Cars or Baby Blankets? Most spammers use keyword phrases as they think it’ll help out their site; which it won’t.

2- What URL did they leave as their homepage? Does the URL look like a laundry list of keywords? http://www.shop-for-ipods.com/ipod-deals/best-ipod-prices.htm. Trying to hard is an indication that the link may be spam.

3- Was their comment generic? Sure, not everyone leaves detailed comments, but an indication of spam may be a comment such as “Great Website”,”I’m really glad I found your blog”, “This is really good content.” Chances are that these comments came from someone who never read your post.

4- Visit the URL. Not for the faint of heart, but if you can’t tell from the indicators above, check out the website and see if it looks like a legit website. Those that are spam are probably filled with ads, have no unique content and probably no real structure.

5- Is it readable? Some spammers like to put in symbols for some odd reason. No matter how you translate it, it doesn’t become readable. If the comment doens’t contain characters that even look vaguely familiar, it may just be spam.

6- Is your name Thomas but they call you Lindsey? Ok, this is a good one. Spam bloggers will quote your blog post and link back to you. However, they quote you as someone else. What’s happening is they have an automated system to pull content and then they add a name to it to make it look more realistic.

7- Does the other site topic match yours? Since spam is usually automated, a pet site may grab any content that has pet related keywords. If you talk about how you’ve been working like a dog, your post may get associated as a pet post. That’s even more evidence that no one is really reading your post, they are just taking it to populate their site.

There is not one give away for identifying all spam trackbacks or comments. Some may have a few of the tactics mentioned above and still be real. It’s up to you, the blog editor, to decide what to keep and what to remove.

The web is a wonderful place, but nothing is off limits to the spammers of the world who try to ruin the fun for everyone. Always keep an eye on your comments for the spammers as they will come. Not only do you want to build a good reputation for your site, but you want to ensure that those comments left by others don’t hurt the identity you want to promote.

Remember, you are in control of your site. You have the right to edit or delete any comments you don’t feel are acceptable.

Example: Can you tell why this site is spam?

1) Advanced Editor
The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that Wordpress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The Wordpress team was really thinking on this one.

3) Auto Updates
If a plugin is hosted on Wordpress.org, or if it ties into the new API, it’ll now check for updates automatically and notify you on the plugins page. No more wondering which plugins are out of date. Wordpress as a whole should do the same thing.

4) Canonical URLs
This is a fancy way of saying they fixed a lot of possible URL issues. From www vs non-www URLs to automatically setting up redirects for when a user changes a post slug.

It even says that Wordpress will now redirect URLs that get cut off in emails to the correct post. This means that if someone types in most of your URL, but is missing part of it, Wordpress will find the best match and display that. It’s very user friendly but not necessarily search friendly as it can cause duplicate content issues.

Example:
Original: http://www.site.com/blog/this-is-my-post/
Cutoff URL: http://www.site.com/blog/this-is-m

Now the cutoff URL will show the same content without redirecting to the correct URL. I’m sure someone will fix this pretty soon.

There are other new features in Wordpress 2.3 too, just not as noticeable to the user. Th is a great update to already amazing software package. Just be sure that your plugins are all 2.3 compatible before upgrading to ensure you have the best experience possible.

What’s Pligg? Pligg is an open source social news & voting software. Basically Digg. Anyone can download it for free and install it on their servers. Sites are popping up all over the internet that are like Digg, only targeted to different topics. This means that their users may be a better match for your stories and you may have better success with a Pligg powered site than Digg.

Pligg is powering sites such as:
Sphinn - For SEO
Foxwire - Firefox & Thunderbird news.
Buddhist Events
Hot2Canada - Canadian News
Killer Startups - Covering internet startup companies.
Blogg Buzz - What’s hot on the internet right now.
Design Float - Design tutorials and tricks.
Dealigg - Social Bargain Hunting
Blogs4God - Christian Blogs
Vroomer - Auto News
The Knit Pligg
YardBarker - Sports

There are many more too. PligSites.com and Pligg.org are tracking hundreds Pligg powered sites. Some are off to a good start with many users, others are small and new, but you never know what’s going to be the next big thing.

Don’t get me wrong, Digg is great for technology and Apple news, however, it’s not a good social news site for all industries. There are new Pligg sites popping up every day for all sorts of industries and, chances are, you’ll have better luck at one of these smaller, more targeted, sites than you will at Digg.