Maria’s Guides

A few minor tweaks.

Just a quick note of some changes I made to this site today:

• Added a Subscribe by E-Mail option at the top of the right sidebar. Use this to get site content delivered to your in-box, one message per day (when there is new content). Guaranteed spam-free, you can opt out any time with a unsubscribe feature that really works. If you don’t follow this site with an RSS reader, this is the next best option to get it all.
• Added a visitor counter to the bottom of the right sidebar. It’s pretty sad right now with a single-digit number; hopefully, that will get pumped up as time goes on. I’m not particularly thrilled with it, but it’ll have to do for now.
• Added a Gravatar reminder to the bottom of the Comment form. This is a note with a link that reminds you that Gravatar images appear beside comments. If you don’t have a Gravatar, why not? They’re a great way to personalize your comments and you can get one for free.

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 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.

Get content delivered to your RSS reader or e-mail box.

There is no easier or more convenient way to follow a blog-based Web site’s content than to subscribe to its RSS feed. Today’s Web browsers and other applications make it easy. For example, RSS feed reading capabilities are built into Safari and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Mail application. Firefox’s Live Bookmarks display new content from your favorite feeds. And there are numerous RSS feed reader applications — NetNewsWire and endo come to mind — that help you manage as many feeds as you have time to follow.

This site Includes both a full-site feed and category feeds. You can subscribe by clicking the RSS icon that appears in the header (for the entire site’s feed) or beside the name of a category under a blog post’s title (for a category feed). Or just use the links listed below.

Through the magic of FeedBurner, I can also offer e-mail subscriptions to site content. Subscriptions are guaranteed to be spam-free, and I don’t give or sell your e-mail address to anyone. Best of all, its easy to unsubscribe from any feed — each e-mail message includes an unsubscribe link that really does work. You’ll find forms for subscribing to topical feeds in the sidebar (when I get around to adding them; sorry!) or you can click the appropriate link below. Just remember to look for and respond to the confirmation e-mail you’ll get from FeedBurner. Your subscription won’t be turned on until you confirm that you want it. (This prevents unwanted subscriptions.)

All Content

Subscribing to this feed will get you all articles, downloads, and other material that appears on this site. I expect to average 5 to 10 posts per week, so it shouldn’t be too overwhelming to get it all. Keep in mind that if you subscribe to this feed, you probably won’t want to subscribe to any of the others listed below; doing so will get duplicate content.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuides

E-Mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides by Email

Mac OS Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to Mac OS and my Mac OS books.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/macosquickstart

E-mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | Mac OS Books by Email

WordPress Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to WordPress and the WordPress books I co-author with Miraz Jordan.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpressquickstart

E-mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | WordPress Books by Email

And if you’re serious about blogging, you might also want to subscribe to blogging-related content on my personal site, An Eclectic Mind: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mariaonblogging

Excel Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to Excel and my Excel books for Mac OS and Windows.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuidesExcelBooks

E-Mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | Excel Books by Email.

Word Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to Word and my Word books for Mac OS and Windows.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuidesWordBooks

E-Mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | Word Books by Email.

Got Questions?

If you have any questions about subscribing to content, please use the Comments link or form below to ask them.