Miscellania: Beating Comment Spam, Trackbacks, Blog Maintentance et cetera

As you may have already discerned, the technical side of blogging is not my forte.  I’m sure it’s relatively straightforward but I just haven’t got around to learning how it all works.

However, I do believe that blogging for business is very worthwhile and will continue to be so, especially in non-Internet and non-technology related niches.

(For example, Jeff Veale from All Suburbs Catering in Sydney publishes his Sydney Catering Blog to keep clients and prospects up to date with what’s happening in the catering world that may be of interest.  Although I don’t have any hard stats, I know that this is one of the many successful marketing strategies that Jeff uses to market his business.)

But back to the subject of this post…

I’ve found that it’s incredibly easy to set up a wordpress blog, but a little harder to manage and customise a blog to your specifications.  Here are a couple of things I’ve learnt along the way.

Beating comment spam

Most blogs allow users to add comments to posts.  Unfortunately, bots take advantage of this to post sometimes hundreds of spammy comments (mostly about niche adult-oriented content you’ve probably never heard about).

Recently I installed the Spam Karma plugin to gobble up spam comments, but it unfortunately gobbled up legitimate comments as well.

So I got rid of that and replaced it with what I’m hoping will be a formidable Akismet / Math Comment tag team (thanks to Yaro for that tip).

Allowing trackbacks

Trackbacks are links between posts on different blogs.  In theory, when someone links to this blog, a “trackback” link should be added to this blog linking back to their blog.  However, this isn’t happening right now - I think this is because I need to supply a special “trackback URL” at the end of each post.   I’m in the process of working out how to do this.

Blog Maintenance

While a blog doesn’t have to be fancy, to make them really work well I believe that they have to be equipped with a good smattering of the latest doohickies that make your blog easy to use, interesting and sticky.   I’ll see what I can add over the next couple of weeks and report back on how it went.

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