Maria’s Guides

I’ve had my last pingback spam.

Anyone who has a blog knows that the comment feature is what makes a blog stand out from a plain old Web site. The comment feature is what makes a blog interactive, it’s what gives readers a chance to share their point of view or additional information about a topic. It gives them a chance to ask questions and get answers.

The comment feature works with the pingback feature. Pingbacks (which are often referred to as trackbacks) are machine-generated “comments” that are added to a post when another blogger writes a post that links to it.

Huh?

Okay, think of it this way. You’re blogger A writing post 1. Blogger B writes post 2 that includes a link to post 1. A comment appears on post 1 that links back to post 2. This is all done automatically in WordPress (my blogging platform of choice) if — and this is a big if — you left the Allow Pings option turned on for post 1. You can find the setting for this in the Discussion area of the Write Post administration panel.

Unfortunately, the pingback feature also makes it possible for sploggers to get free links to their sites. A splogger builds content on a blog by stealing it from RSS feeds. Their goal is usually to get hits on their Web sites, which are full of Google AdSense ads, but they sometimes are part of a “link farm” that boosts search engine ranking.

The problem lately is that my sites have been attracting more pingback spam from splogging sites than real pings from legitimate sites and bloggers. These must be manually deleted, since my spam prevention software doesn’t seem able to catch them all. And frankly, I’m a little sick of spending each morning deleting six to twenty of these comments.

So I’m going to stop writing posts with the pingback feature enabled.

And if you’re having this problem on your blog, I recommend that you do the same.

A realize that I messed up the Maria’s Guides feeds and fix them. Sort of.

I’ve been using FeedBurner for a few years now — although I’m not 100% sure why anymore. The service enables you to add features to an RSS feed that [supposedly] makes them better. What I like most about FeedBurner is the ability to track the number of feed subscribers. I’m a stats nut and being able to quantify my blog’s impact makes me feel good.

A FeedBurner Primer

Here’s how FeedBurner works. You go to the FeedBurner Web site and enter the URL for a feed you want to “burn.” This brings the feed into FeedBurner so you can add its features. You then publish the FeedBurner URL for the feed and encourage visitors to use that to subscribe.

So, for example, this site’s WordPress-generated feed is http://www.mariasguides.com/feed. But it’s FeedBurner feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuides.

Notice how I made the second URL a hyperlink and not the first one? That’s because I want you to subscribe to the FeedBurner feed (if you’d like to subscribe) but not the WordPress feed.

Two Feeds, Same Content

And that’s where the problem starts. By using FeedBurner, I have [at least] two feeds. And that screws up the stats capabilities of FeedBurner — my favorite feature, if you recall — because FeedBurner can only count the subscribers to its feed.

The solution, therefore, is to redirect the WordPress feed to the FeedBurner feed. And the folks at FeedBurner have a WordPress plugin that’ll do just that: the FeedBurner Feedsmith Plugin 2.3. This plugin, once installed and activated, enables you to enter the URL for your WordPress feed and the URL for your FeedBurner feed. It then does what it needs to to make sure everyone who asks for the WordPress feed you entered is automatically directed to the corresponding FeedBurner feed that you entered.

Not a Good Enough Solution

Unfortunately, this plugin does only part of the job I need done for Maria’s Guides. This site has separate feeds for each book support category. If I used the plugin, it would only redirect the main FeedBurner feed. Or, worse yet, redirect all category feeds to the main FeedBurner feed. (I admit that I don’t know what it would do because I haven’t tried it. I do know that it won’t meet all of my needs.)

Enter .htaccess

Of course, I had the same problem back when all this content was on An Eclectic Mind. Back then, I solved it by directing about 95% of site traffic to the appropriate FeedBurner feed. (That was close enough for me.) I did all this with redirect statements in my site’s .htaccess file. I even gloated about the success here.

Trouble is, I didn’t keep a copy of the .htaccess file. And I didn’t write an article, in detail, stating how I solved the problem. (I was probably afraid of opening the floodgates to people with .htaccess questions, most of which I’m sure I couldn’t answer. I don’t know enough about .htaccess to help other people. Hell, I had to buy a book to learn enough to solve my own problem.

You can probably figure out what comes next. The .htaccess file I’d so carefully crafted almost a year ago was lost. It was some weird server problem that caused me to overwrite the existing file with a blank copy. No problem, I figured. I’ll just use the backup copy. But there was no backup. When I used Fetch to back up the contents of my Web site’s main folder (as we should all do periodically), the .htaccess file wasn’t copied. Probably because it’s invisible.

Back to the Coding Board

So I had to start at square one.

I recreated the redirect instructions that would send subscribers to the FeedBurner feeds as necessary. It was remarkably easy. I even tested each one. It worked — when I entered my WordPress feed address, it automatically displayed the FeedBurner feed.

Unfortunately, it was wrong.

My redirects also redirected FeedBurner, which needed to read the original feed to keep its own feed up-to-date. So FeedBurner was unable to get up-to-date information and thus, its feed wasn’t up-to-date. And because of the redirect, I’d made it impossible for anyone to get the up-to-date content, no matter which URL they used.

As you can imagine, I turned all those commands off. Everything now works, although I still have the original problem of not being able to redirect subscribers to the FeedBurner feeds.

Help from FeedBurner? Not!

I went back to the FeedBurner forums to get assistance with my problem. I did a search and found someone who had the same problem I had — multiple feeds from the same WordPress blog being pointed to FeedBurner. He asked the question I would have asked.

Great, I thought to myself. I won’t have to reinvent my wheel. I can use someone else’s.

But the response from FeedBurner’s support staff was sobering. They said it was an .htaccess problem, not a FeedBurner problem. They couldn’t help. And they pointed the poor guy (and me and probably countless others) back to the support post I’d found about a year ago. It was written to help someone with a TypePad redirect issue and had evolved to disjointed WordPress support. I had spent quite some time studying the code before coming up with my solution.

It appeared I was going to be repeating that exercise.

Is it Worth It?

Which makes me wonder if it’s worth using FeedBurner at all. What’s the benefit?

Other than the counter, the only real benefit is the ability to include Google ads in my feed. I tried this out (briefly) and was not impressed. The ad was huge and placement was poor. (I think I can fix the placement problem.) So I turned it off. People don’t read my blogs to look at ads, so I’m pretty careful about how I place them. I know how much I hate looking at ads. Although it would be nice to get a few clicks to help cover hosting costs, etc., I can live without them.

Back in the old days — a year or two ago — some of FeedBurner’s features were extremely useful. They helped make feeds more readable by Web browsers in the days before RSS feeds gained so much popularity. But now, with every modern browser capable of reading any RSS feed? Who knows.

For now, I’m just not going to deal with it.

A few easy steps can get your custom image on gravatar-enabled blogs.

If you read a lot of blogs, you’re probably already familiar with gravatars — custom images that represent certain commenters. These images are a kind of personal logo that identifies them and says something about their personality.

Here’s how gravatars work. A commenter creates an image suitable for a gravatar and uploads it to his account on gravatar.com. The gravatar is rated using pretty much the same ratings as the movie industry: G, PG, R, and X. These ratings are used by bloggers to set limits on the kinds of gravatars that appear on their sites — a gravatar with a G rating will appear everywhere while a gravatar with an X rating may not appear on many blogs at all.

Meanwhile, a blogger (like me) sets up her blog to enable it for gravatars. Then, when a commenter submits a comment, the blog’s gravatar plugin takes the commenter’s e-mail address (submitted in the comment form) and attempts to find a match at gravatar.com. If it finds a match, it displays the corresponding image. (The e-mail address is not used anywhere in the underlying page code.) If there’s no image on file, the plugin either displays nothing or displays a default image chosen by the blogger.

If you frequently participate in blogs by leaving comments for blog posts, you should consider creating a gravatar. Its easy and its free. Here’s how.

1. Go to gravatar.com’s Signup Page.
   
2. Enter your e-mail address in the box and click Signup. A message appears, telling you that an e-mail message has been sent to your account.
3. Check your e-mail. You should find a message from Gravatar with the subject “Welcome to Gravatar.”
4. Click the URL link in the e-mail message. Your browser opens and displays a message confirming that you have successfully activated your account.
   
5. Enter a password for your account in each of the boxes that appear and click Set Password.
6. If you want to receive a Gravatar newsletter, click the button in the next screen. Otherwise, click No Thanks.
7. Use your favorite graphics application to create an image suitable for use as a gravatar. For best results, it should be 80×80 pixels in size and not include a border. (Keep in mind that it might be displayed at smaller sizes.)
8. Save the image as a JPG, GIF, or PNG image with an Internet-friendly name (no spaces or weird characters).
9. Use your Web browser to open your My Gravatars page on gravatar.com. (You may need to log in to your account.)
   
10. Click the add a new one link.
11. In the next screen, click My computer’s hard drive.
12. In the next screen, click the Browse button. Then use the standard dialog that appears to locate, select and open the image file you created for your gravatar. The pathname appears in the File box.
    
13. Click the Next button. The file is uploaded and appears in the rating screen.
    
14. Click the appropriate button to apply a rating to the Gravatar. Don’t lie; this is important. And remember that for maximum exposure, it’s good to create a gravatar rated G or PG.
15. Your newly created Gravatar appears in the My Gravatars screen. Click it to select it for your e-mail address. When prompted, click the Confirm button. Here’s what it might look like when you’re finished:
    

You can repeat steps 10 through 14 to add additional images. You can then change your gravatar by simply selecting one of the new images. As you’ll see your gravatar changes globally wherever it’s used when you change it.

From that point on, your gravatar should appear whenever you post a comment to a gravatar-enabled blog — like this one.

Do you have a gravatar now? Show it off by entering a brief comment on this post.

A WordPress plugin to add links to RSS feeds.

On pages 165-166 of WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide, Miraz and I discuss CG-Feedread, a plugin that enables you to list the titles (with links) of posts on another blog based on RSS feed content. We use the plugin on our WPVQS.com Web site to list content from Miraz’s Mactips.info site and my An Eclectic Mind site.

I hate to admit it, but I never really liked that plugin. It came as part of a package and I was only interested in that one part. So today, while attempting to add the same feature to two of my WordPress-based sites, I looked for a different, simpler solution. And I found it: RSSImport by Frank Bueltge.

RSSImport is a one-trick pony. It enables you to add a list of posts from any RSS feed. There are four options: the number of posts to list, the URL of the feed, whether the list should include descriptions, and whether the post title should be truncated to 30 characters.

You install and activate the plugin like any other plugin. (You can refer to Chapter 7 of our book or consult the documentation that comes with the file if you need help.) Then place the following code in your template file — most likely sidebar.php — where you want the list to appear:

<?php RSSImport(10,
"http://feeds.feedburner.com/mariasguides"
,false,false); ?>

The options go between the parentheses. In this example, I’ll pull 10 posts from the Maria’s Guides feed, exclude the description, and disable the 30-character limit on posts. The result looks like this on An Eclectic Mind. As you can see, I included a heading before the code so the list would blend in with the rest of my sidebar content.

And if you look on the Maria’s Guides site, you’ll see a similar list for an Eclectic Mind. (The two sites used to be one and they’re still somewhat “joined at the hip.”)

I recommend the plugin if you’re looking for a simple solution to list another blog’s posts. But if you want to list multiple blogs’ posts in the same list, CG-Feedread is probably a better solution.

A Command key trick.

While working in a Finder window, you can use the Command key and mouse to learn where the window’s folder resides in the file hierarchy. Just hold down the Command key while clicking on the folder icon in the title bar:

Okay, so maybe you already knew that. But did you know that you can do the same trick in a document window when that document is opened in an application? Command-click the document icon and see the path to its location on disk.

Either way, choosing a folder in the hierarchy opens that folder in the Finder.

An opinion poll.

I launched this site as a spinoff from by blog, An Eclectic Mind. The idea was to provide an online home for my computer how-to articles and book support information that was separate from my blog.

To meet visitors’ needs and deliver the content they want most, I’ve put together a poll to ask what information visitors want most. While I won’t provide only the most-wanted content, I will provide more content for that topic than the others.

What do you think? Tell me what you want to see here. And don’t be afraid to use the Comments form or link below to get more specific or list your second and third choices for content.

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You can find this poll in the sidebar — at least for a while. Although you can only vote in the poll once, you can use the Comments feature for this post as many times as you like to sound off on this topic.