Maria’s Guides

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.

A good trackback tutorial on another Web site.

The tutorial, which is quite clear, can be found at WordPress TrackBack Tutorial. it includes a good deal of information about WordPress’s trackback and pingback features, including what they do and how to use them.

I looked up the article because I couldn’t get the feature to work right from this blog. I’m following the instructions and I still can’t get it to work properly. It’s kind of hard to write about something when you can’t get it to work. Very frustrating for me, since I assume I’m just making one tiny mistake over and over.

So this post is yet another attempt at a trackback. Well, actually a pingback. Hopefully, it’ll work.

I buy a new iPod accessory.

It isn’t the iPod that’s costly. It’s the accessories.

Anyway, one of the things I like to do with my iPod is listen to podcasts. The only problem is that I don’t listen to my iPod often enough to keep up with all the podcasts I like to follow.

I decided that a good time to listen to podcasts was in the afternoon, when I got home from work and was doing things around the kitchen. You know: emptying the dishwasher, making dinner, cleaning up after Alex the Bird.

I used to plug the iPod into my Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which has a great sound system. But the other day the darn thing just stopped working. (My third Mac hardware problem in 6 months. They say bad things come in threes.) I have to decide whether I want to find someone to fix it or just leave it in the living room as a nonfunctioning conversation piece.

I tried plugging the iPod into my 12″ PowerBook, which spends a lot of time in the kitchen. The PowerBook’s hard drive is too full to keep the podcasts on it. But I couldn’t get the volume up loud enough to hear over Alex the Bird or the water running in the sink.

What I needed, I decided, was a set of portable speaker that I could use in the kitchen or take up to Howard Mesa or bring along on road trips. Something that had decent sound and was very portable.

I did some research. I found i-Fusion.

I read the reviews on the Apple Store Web site. Everyone absolutely raved about the sound quality. I was a little skeptical. These speakers were small. I don’t care what the case is made of. They can only be so good. Fortunately, I didn’t need Bose quality sound. I just needed something that would sound okay and not distort if I turned up the volume a bit.

One reviewer whined that there wasn’t a place to store the power adapter. There is, however, a place to store the iPod and the earbuds. (I normally keep both in my purse when I travel.)

The price was a bit higher than I was willing to spend. My budget was about $100. This was $149. But I found it on the Tiger Direct Web site for $129 plus shipping for a total of about $135. And I felt as if I needed a treat, so I bought it.

It came today.

I must be spoiled when it comes to sound quality. Maybe it’s because Mike used to sell stereo systems and he buys good stuff for the house. Not expensive stuff, but good stuff. Stuff that sounds good. Really good.

i-Fusion does not sound really good. It sounds fine, but not really good. Those reviewers at the Apple Store Web site really need to spend some time in a stereo shop’s sound booth. Heck, I have a Sony boom box in my hangar that sounds better than this. But I’m not complaining. It’s certainly listenable and it can be turned up quite loud.

The case seems sturdy, the storage spaces are a bit silly but functional. I agree about the power adapter. It seems that they could have built the DC converter into the box (perhaps where the earbuds are supposed to go?) and made a retractable cord. That would have been a better design decision. But I can certainly imagine taking this little bugger on the road. With its built-in, rechargable litium-ion battery, it’ll be great for Howard Mesa, which doesn’t have electricity (yet).

Happy with my purchase? I think so.

I’ll let you know when I catch up on all those podcasts.

I set up posting by e-mail and test it.

This is a test to see if posting by e-mail works.

Posting by e-mail is a WordPress feature that enables you to post blog entries by sending an e-mail message to a secret e-mail address. The address is secret because if it weren’t, then anyone could post to the blog.

If you’re seeing this, it means I set it up correctly. If the first line is bold, that means formatting works, too. If you’re not seeing this, then I’m writing to myself (it won’t be the first time) and I’ll have to check the setup.

Let’s see how we do…clicking Send now!

Why you shouldn’t include a link to your e-mail address on your Web site.

Many people — including me! — use their Web sites as a kind of global calling card, a way to share information about themselves or their companies with others all over the world. It’s common to want to share your contact information with site visitors — particularly potential customers — so they can contact you. This is often done through the use of a mailto tag. For example, <a href="mailto:me@domain.com">e-mail me!</a> which appears as a clickable e-mail link.

Unfortunately there are people out there who want your e-mail address, people who want to scam you into sending money to Nigeria, advertise their online casinos, sell you prescription drugs, show you their porn sites — the list goes on and on. If you have your e-mail address on any Web site, you probably already get a lot of this spam. That’s because of computer programs that crawl through Web sites and harvest e-mail addresses that are included in the otherwise innocent mailto tag. Heck, they even harvest addresses that aren’t part of a mailto tag, so just including your e-mail address on a Web page without a link can get you on a bulk e-mail list.

So what’s the solution? There are a few.

One popular and easy-to-implement solution is to turn your e-mail address into a text phrase that a site visitor must see and manually type in to use. For example, me@domain.com becomes me at domain dot com or meATdomainDOTcom. You get the idea. Someone who wanted to send you an e-mail message, would be able to figure that out — if he couldn’t, he really shouldn’t be surfing the ‘Net anyway — and manually enter the correct translation in his e-mail program. But e-mail harvesters supposedly can’t figure this out (which I find hard to believe) so the e-mail address isn’t harvested.

Another solution is to use an e-mail obfuscation program. These programs take e-mail addresses and change or insert characters to make them impossible to read. The e-mail addresses look okay on the site — to a person viewing them — and work fine in a mailto link — when used from the Web site. WordPress plugins are available to do this. I don’t use any of them, so I can’t comment on how well they work. But they must be at least a little helpful if they’re available. You can find a few here, on the WordPress Codex.

The solution I use is form-based e-mail. I created a Contact Form with fields for the site visitor to fill out. When the form is submitted, a program processes it and sends it to my e-mail address. Because that address is not on the Web page that includes the form — or on any other Web page, for that matter — e-mail harvesters cannot see it. As a result, I’m able to provide a means of contacting me via e-mail that keeps my e-mail address safe from spammers.

The program I use is called NateMail from MindPalette Software. it’s a free PHP tool that’s easy to install and configure. But what I like best about it is that you can set it up with multiple e-mail addresses. Use a corresponding drop-down list in your form to allow the site visitor to choose the person the e-mail should go to. NateMail directs the message to the correct person. You can see this in action on my other WordPress-based site, wickenburg-az.com, in its Contact Form. If you want a few more features, such as the ability to attach files to an e-mail message, MindPalette offers ProcessForm for only $15.

Other WordPress users are likely to have their own favorite methods of protecting their e-mail addresses from spammers. With luck, a few of them who read this will share their thoughts in the Comments for this post.

One more thing…this doesn’t just apply to WordPress-based sites. It applies to all Web sites. And a contact form tool like NateMail will work with any PHP-compatible Web server.

If you’re already getting spam, using one of these methods won’t stop it. It’ll just keep the situation from getting much worse. Your best bet is to change your e-mail address and protect the new one. In my case, that’s a big pain in the butt — so many people I need to be in touch with have my e-mail address and, worse yet, I often use it as a login for Web sites I visit (which does indeed make the spam situation worse). I’m working on a plan to phase out the bad addresses and replace them with ones that I protect. Until then, I have to rely on the spam-catching features of my ISP and my e-mail software to sort out the bad stuff — currently about 20-40 messages a day — so I don’t have to.

Information from Software Update

The Mac OS X 10.4.6 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies:

• login and authentication in a variety of network environments
• file access and byte range locking with AFP file sharing
• network access when using proxy server automatic configuration files
• connecting to Cisco VPN servers using IP/Sec
• using Bluetooth wireless devices
• searching iWork ‘06 and Microsoft Office documents with Spotlight
• saving Word documents automatically when using a network home directory
• creating Automator workflows for iPhoto 6
• synchronizing contacts and calendars to .Mac and mobile phones
• mounting and unmounting iDisk volumes
• compatibility with third party applications and devices
• previous standalone security updates

For detailed information on this Update, visit http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n303411.

For detailed information on Security Updates, visit http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798.