Maria’s Guides

I create a Page template that lists RSS feeds by category.

As you can probably tell by the number of WordPress-related posts I’ve written today, I spent most of the day tweaking WordPress.

My last tweak of the day was to create a Page template for RSS feeds. You can view it by clicking the RSS link at the top of any page.

It’s late and I’m tired, so I’m not going to explain right now how I created this template. Hopefully, I’ll get to it in the morning. It was easy to do and I think it’s a good exercise for WordPress users interested in giving site visitors access to RSS feeds by category.

More tomorrow.

I make it possible to subscribe to the RSS feed for a specific book support site.

I use a WordPress plugin (of course) called UsersOnline to monitor site visitors. The plugin identifies what page the user is visiting. When I see a visitor on the “Oops! Page Not Found” page, I can point to a link to see the URL that took him or her there. I noticed that an awful lot of site visitors were attempting to access the RSS feeds for the old versions of the book support sites. The same sites that don’t exist anymore.

Figuring that it must be pretty frustrating to try to access a feed that no longer exists, I added new links to the new feeds. You can find them in the sidebar for each of the book support sites. The “Get New Content Automatically” section also includes a link to more information about RSS for those people who aren’t familiar with it. The link goes to the NewsGator Web site, which makes newsreader software for Windows and Macintosh users.

I’ll probably create a custom RSS feed page for the site shortly and replace the link with a link to that. That’ll enable site visitors to access the entire blog or individual categories (books or blog topics) by RSS feed.

Comments? Use the link below.

Or at least I think I did.

I should get my head examined. I just added another WordPress plugin. That’s two in about two hours.

This one adds gravatars to comments. A gravatar, in case you don’t know, is a globally recognized avatar or image associated with a person. Or, in this case, a person’s e-mail address.

To get a gravatar, sign up for a free account at gravatar.com, complete the registration process for your e-mail address, and upload an 80×80 pixel JPEG or PNG image you want to appear as your gravatar. The staff at gravatar.com will rate your image so if it’s not appropriate for some sites, it won’t appear there. Then, when you enter a comment on a gravatar-enabled blog or site, your image will appear with your comment.

I say I think I set it up properly because although I installed the Gravatar plugin for WordPress and inserted the code in the comment loop, I don’t have any comments from people with gravatars. (Mine hasn’t been approved yet.) So I can’t see if it’s working.

If you have a gravatar rated R or lower and want to show it off (and help me determine whether the plugin is working), add a comment to this post.

Otherwise, I’ll just have to wait until I’m rated and see if I appear.

I spend most of a day trying to figure out why I can’t send trackbacks from my blog.

If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’m working on a book about WordPress with Miraz Jordan. We split the chapters down the middle, with me getting the first half and Miraz getting the second. One of my chapters covers comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks, three features of WordPress that allow feedback and interactivity between blogs and readers.

On my two WordPress-powered sites, the comments feature works fine. A bit too fine, in fact, as the sites quickly became victims of comment spam. Fortunately, Dr. Dave makes a great comment spam prevention plugin for WordPress called Spam Karma and that catches about 99% of the spam aimed at my two sites. I can easily catch the rest using WordPress’s built-in moderation tools. I’ll be covering all this information in detail in Chapter 4 of our book.

I never really experimented much with the trackback and pingback features. Rather than going into a long, detailed explanation of what these features are, if you’re interested (and can’t wait for the book), you can visit the WordPress Trackback Tutorial on Optiniche.com.

One thing I will point out here is that pingbacks are automatic notification of a blog that your blog refers to it. For example, so far I’ve provided links to two specific blog entries (one on Dr. Dave’s site and one on Optiniche). Because WordPress is configured to automatically notify compatible sites when you link to them, a comment should be created for blog entry I linked to, providing an excerpt from my post and other information. You can see an example on this site from Miraz in the comments on this post. Even the link I just created to my own blog entry should result in a pingback to my blog.

Unfortunately, none of this is working. And yesterday, I spent a good part of the day troubleshooting to find out why. After all, it’s difficult to write about something when you can’t get it to work right.

Don’t get me wrong — I know exactly how it should work. I’ve probably read more about the trackback feature in the past two days than most WordPress users read in their lifetimes. And I tortured Miraz yesterday by asking her to trackback and pingback to my site to make sure I could receive these. (I can.) I just can’t send them.

Oddly enough, I attempted to create a trackback from my demo WordPress.com blog. It appeared to go to its destination, but it never showed up there.

In troubleshooting, I found two possible problems mentioned in the WordPress Codex, both of which will require a visit to the server where the sites reside.

First, there’s some indication that the pings might be “stuck” in a queue, resulting in an endless loop while WordPress tries to send them. I’m not so sure about this. It seems to me if that there was some kind of loop thing going on, WordPress would be bogged down by the effort. Yet my two sites seems to perform okay. Still, the cure seems to be to use some MySQL commands to flush out the contents of the to_ping field. Since I don’t think it will hurt anything to do this, I’ll give it a try.

Other people experiencing this same problem claim that this does not help. One person believes it has to do with a blog getting very large and a memory problem resulting. I can believe this with my blogs. Although I only have about 400 entries in each, the entries in this blog tend to be very lengthy. Add to that my love of customization via plugin and you have a very busy WordPress trying to do all kind of things with lots of data. To fix this, I need to visit my server and make some changes to the php.ini file. (I already tried modifying .htaccess, as the article suggests, but that doesn’t appear to help.)

I’m also thinking at this point that it may have something to do with a recently installed plugin. On this site, my automatic database backup stopped working, although it continues to work reliably on wickenburg-az.com.

Am I pushing WordPress too hard? Perhaps. Hopefully I’ll resolve this problem soon so I can back to work.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for me, please don’t keep them to yourself.