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Starting to Blog and Building Your Community CHAPTER 1 5 In this chapter, I ll take you through some simple steps to enhance your blog and build your community. First, you ll look in a little more depth at posting to your blog, using both the standard and advanced editing options. I ll show you that you don t need to have any great HTML skills to make rich content for your site. Then you ll see how to manage categories, manage comments, add multiple authors for your site, and create blog pages. During the course of this chapter, you ll install and use two plug-ins, giving you an idea of what WordPress plug-ins can help you do on your site. Finally, I ll give you some tips on improving the search engine visibility of your site, to attract more visitors. Using Basic Post Options In the previous chapter, you created your first post and got a glimpse of the options available for writing posts. Here, I ll describe these options in more detail. You will need to go to the Write Post page to follow along with the discussion. If you are already logged in to your blog, click the Site Admin link at the bottom of the sidebar. If you are not logged in, click the Login link in the same place. From the Dashboard page, click the Write link. Marking Up Your Post with Quicktags As you are writing your post, you can use the quicktag buttons, as shown in Figure 15-1, to add some markup to your posts. Table 15-1 shows the functions of these buttons. Figure 15-1. You can use the quicktag buttons to mark up your post.
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400 CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS Summary This chapter took you through obtaining, installing, and configuring a simple out-of-the-box WordPress blog. It covered the requirements for WordPress and the tasks for preparing your hosting server. I introduced you to some of the basic features of WordPress. Finally, you made your first post. In the next chapter, I will take you through the posting process in depth and introduce some of the more advanced features of WordPress. You will learn how to create pages, manage categories, and perform other tasks to start to build your community.
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CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS 399 Type in a title and the content of your post. You can use the quicktag buttons just above the large edit area to format your story, to add links, and so on. I ll go into detail about the quicktags and other posting options in the next chapter. When you are happy with your story, click the Publish button. That s it, you ve made your first post! Click the View site link at the top of the page and admire the masterpiece you just produced! Figure 14-15 shows an example. You may notice that there is already another post on your site. That is a test post the system creates for you as part of the installation. You can safely delete that once you have created your own post. Figure 14-15. A first post
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398 CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS The next setting on this page allows you to specify a maximum file upload size. You may want to set this to some value appropriate to the files you will be uploading. If you are going to allow other people to post and upload files to your blog, you may want to set this to a lower value. The Allowed file extensions setting is a space-separated list of file extensions that Word- Press will allow to be uploaded. You might want to add mp3 if you are going to add MP3s to your posts, perhaps if you are podcasting. The last setting in this section is the minimum user privilege level required before a registered user is able to upload files. If you have multiple authors on your blog, you might want to allow only certain authors to upload files. You would raise their user level to this value to allow them to do that (raising user levels is discussed in Chapter 15). The Track Links Update Times check box refers to the blogroll-style links that WordPress supports. If you check this box and include the file wp-admin/update-links.php in your theme file, WordPress will automatically track the last time the blogs in your links were updated. Finally, the Use legacy my-hacks.php file support setting refers to an old pre-plug-in system that WordPress used to support. As you are installing a new blog, you won t need to turn on this setting. Making Your First Post You are now in a position to make your first post to your blog. Go ahead and click the Write tab. You ll see the Write Post page, shown in Figure 14-14. Figure 14-14. Write Post page
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CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS 397 Below the comment blacklist box is the Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies check box. This setting blacklists comments that are made through a particular open proxy known for being used by spammers. Comments matching this criterion also disappear without notification. Setting File Upload Options The next set of options you will want to tweak are those involving adding images and other media to your blog. Click the Miscellaneous tab under Options to get to these options, as shown in Figure 14-13. Figure 14-13. Miscellaneous Options page If you want to be able to add images and other media to your blog posts, you need to enable file uploads. WordPress usually guesses the Destination directory setting correctly. This is the full path to the wp-contentfolder on your server. The URI of this directory setting is the web-visible URI the server will expose this folder as. WordPress sometimes gets this wrong. The URI it guesses works, but not all the time, particularly in the administration pages, so you cannot see your images in preview mode. Change this to an absolute path on the server. For example, if your blog URI is http://example.com/ myblog, set it to /myblog/wp-content. You can use a folder completely outside the WordPress folder if you like. For example, you may have an existing /imagesfolder you wish to use. Whichever folder you choose, it will need to be writable by the web server.
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396 CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS Before a Comment Appears The first setting in this section, An administrator must approve the comment, means that an administrator must approve every single comment (including TrackBacks and Pingbacks) before it is displayed on your site. To that end, all comments are placed in a moderation queue. This is the most effective anti-comment spam measure. Nothing gets past WordPress, because you must approve each comment before it is posted on your site. As you can imagine, enabling comment approval is the most inconvenient setting for you and your readers. They must wait to see their comments appear, so you lose out on the immediacy of the blog-commenting system. This can have quite an effect on the ability to build and maintain a community based around your blog. You must also process these comments by hand, preferably at regular intervals in order to maintain some kind of immediacy for your community. That can be a lot of work, given that some comment spammers use automated scripts that can submit many hundreds of comments to your blog each day. This setting is really a last resort. The next setting, Comment author must fill out name and e-mail, simply requires that a comment author fill in the name and e-mail settings in order to post a comment. While not too exacting (you don t need to add a real e-mail address), this setting will defeat a couple of the more basic spam scripts. The final setting in this section, Comment author must have a previously approved comment, works in conjunction with its predecessor. If a comment author enters the same name and e-mail address as that of a previously approved comment, then WordPress will allow the comment to appear on the site immediately. Conveniently, WordPress will set a cookie in a visitor s browser that will allow it to prepopulate the username, e-mail, and URL for that visitor. Comment Moderation The next group of settings are more directly concerned with defeating comment spam. First, you can set a threshold for the number of links a comment can contain before it is considered to be possible spam and placed in the comment moderation queue. A common feature of one type of spam is dozens of links to sites of a dubious nature. This setting (with a default setting of 2) addresses that. The next setting is a space for a list of trigger words. If a comment has any of these words in it (in any part of the comment), WordPress will immediately place the comment in the moderation queue. For convenience, there is a link to a centrally maintained list of common spam words. You can visit that page and copy the list there into your own list. Comment Blacklist The final section of the Discussion Options page is a comment blacklist. If any of the words in this list are found in a comment, that comment does not even appear in the moderation queue. Be careful which words you put in this list. If any word matches and even partial words can match you will not even be notified by e-mail about the comment, unlike with all of the other methods. Thus, you will not normally get chance to approve a comment that matches the blacklisted words here. In fact, blacklisted comments (and ones that you designate as spam during moderation) are still in the database. WordPress does not currently provide any way to access them once they are marked as spam. However, at least one WordPress plug-in (http://www.coldforged.org/ paged-comment-editing-plugin/) allows you to browse through spam comments and reclassify them.
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CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS 395 Figure 14-12. Sample notification e-mail Avoiding Comment Spam Comment spam refers to comments that are made on your blog by comment spammers for the purpose of promoting their commercial sites. They usually have one of two purposes in mind, sometimes both: They want to get links to their sites in as many places as possible in the hope that a lot of people will click the link. They want to gain higher placing in search-engine rankings by being linked to from as many places as possible. The commercial sites the spammers link to are usually online casinos, drug-selling sites, or porn sites. Quite often, the comments link to sites that don t appear to be commercial sites, but rather seem to be offering useful information about their subject. Don t be fooled. The idea is that you and search engines won t penalize these sites because they appear to be innocent. Often, the comments with links to these sites seem innocuous, something like, This is my first visit to your site. I thought it was great. The spammers hope that the links to these sites will remain in place and gain various advantages, particularly with search engines. At some point in the future, they will switch on the commercial pages, either as links within the text to the commercial sites or by replacing the page with a commercial one. WordPress includes several measures to combat and thwart the spammers. These are available through the comment settings on the Discussion Options page (see Figure 14-11).
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394 CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS to be a specific story. This setting, along with WordPress s ability to automatically Pingback links you mention in your post, is a great feature and a good way to start to build your community. You should have this enabled. A word of caution, though: if you mention a lot of links in your post, and if the network around your server is busy or slow, it can appear to take a very long time to post your story. In fact, the story is posted quite quickly, but the Pingback process involving a conversation with several other servers that might be equally busy can take over a minute. It might appear as though your server has stopped, but a lot is going on in the background. The next setting, Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (Pingbacks and TrackBacks), is about allowing Pingbacks and TrackBacks to your posts. You should probably leave this enabled, too. Another word of caution: there have been attempts to exploit the concept of TrackBacks for spamming purposes. WordPress comes configured to handle this, but you should be aware of the issue. I ll elaborate when I cover the subject of comment spam in the next section. The next setting turns on user comments (it is off by default). Without this setting, no one can leave a comment on your posts. If you want to build a community, you ll need to enable this option. Comments are the lifeblood of a community blog, or even one that just wishes to interact with its readers. Note that this setting governs the default setting for all new posts. It doesn t affect posts you ve already created, and an individual post can override this setting. WordPress is very flexible! E-Mail The next two settings on the Discussion Options page govern when you receive e-mail from your WordPress blog. You can have WordPress send you an e-mail message whenever anyone posts a comment or sends a TrackBack or Pingback. And you can have WordPress send you an e-mail message whenever a comment is held for moderation. Comment moderation is covered in the next section. Figure 14-12 shows a sample e-mail message sent when a comment has been left on your blog. In it, you can see the blog name and posting title included in the subject. The message also includes details of the comment author s name, e-mail, and URI, if supplied, and, of course, the visitor s comment. For checking and tracing purposes, the e-mail also includes the IP address of the visitor as reported by the web server, a reverse DNS lookup, and a link to a WHOIS lookup of that IP address. These three items should give you useful information if you are the victim of comment spam or some other comment nastiness. Unfortunately, some of the spammers post remotely from innocent machines or through third-party proxies, or else spoof the IP address, rendering those pieces of information less useful. For convenience, the e-mail also includes a link to the posting on which the comment was made. This allows you to read the comment in context of the post and other comments. It also includes a direct link to automatically delete the comment. If the e-mail is about a comment that is waiting for moderation, there will also be a link to automatically approve the comment and one to take you to the comment moderation page.
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