Tag Archives: blogging

How to Embed a Tweet in a Blog Post or Website

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Finding and using a new feature on Twitter.com.

Twitter’s getting a facelift. In fact, as I write this, I’m one of a limited number of early adopters who have sped the arrival of the new version by installing and using the iPhone (in my case) or Android app.

The new Twitter is a dramatic change in the interface — one I plan to review in a video for Lynda.com soon. In the meantime, I’m picking out a few new features to explore in detail here in Maria’s Guides.

In this post, I’ll explore the new ability to embed a tweet — like the one shown here — within a blog post or web page.

  1. On Twitter.com, point to the tweet you want to embed and then click the Open link that appears to open it. (You could also simply double-click the tweet.)
    Open the Tweet
  2. Click the Details link to display the tweet in its own window.
    Click the Details Link
  3. Click the Embed this Tweet link.
    Click Embed this Tweet
  4. The Embed this Tweet pop-up window appears. It has three tabs:
    • HTML enables you to embed the tweet in a blog post or website using HTML. You select the alignment option you want by clicking a button and then copy and paste the code at the top of the tab. In this example, I’ve clicked Right because I want the tweet right aligned (as you see above).
      HTML Embed Code
    • Shortcode enables you to embed the tweet in a blog post on a blogging platform that supports short codes, such as WordPress. Again, set the alignment option you want by clicking a button and then copy and past the code at the top of the tab.
      Shortcode
    • Link displays a direct link to the tweet that you can copy and paste anywhere you like: email message, Facebook, Google+, comment form, or HTML editor to create your own link manually.
      Link

    In this example, I simply pasted the code in the HTML tab into the beginning of this blog post, which I wrote in HTML (I’m a bit old-fashioned that way). If you use WordPress and prefer Rich Text mode, you can do the same thing with the shortcode.

That’s all there is to it.

What’s handy about this is that not only does it display the tweet in its entirety with the tweeter’s profile picture and name, but it has live links to follow that person on Twitter, Reply, Retweet, and Favorite. Cool, no?

Let me teach you more about Twitter!

Get more from your software.You can watch seven videos from my Twitter Essential Training course for free. Click here to get started.

Comment Moderation: Fighting Spam and Trolls

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A few tips from a long-time blogger.

As any blogger with even a slightly popular blog can tell you, good comment moderation is an absolute requirement to maintain a good, readable blog.

The way I see it, comment moderation serves two purposes:

  • It prevents your blog from being an advertising platform for people who don’t contribute real content. I’m not just talking about obvious spam here, either.
  • It prevents your blog from being a platform for offensive or abusive people who don’t contribute real content. And yes, I am talking about trolls here.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these two points.

Comments by Spammers

There are two kinds of comment spam.

One type — the most prevalent — is mostly automated spam posted by software commonly referred to as spambots. Once your blog gets on the radar (so to speak), automated spam can be quite significant. This blog, for example, attracts more than 500 automated spam comments a day.

This kind of spam is pretty easy to recognize. One type, for example, includes multiple links for things like online gambling, prescription medication, or pornography. The other type puts its link in the comment form’s URL field and then fills the comment field with text that may or may not make sense but has nothing to do with the content of the original post. Here’s an example from my post titled “Five Tips for Composing a More Effective Social Networking Bio“:

I precisely had to thank you so much all over again. I am not sure the things that I could possibly have accomplished in the absence of the entire tricks contributed by you on my problem. It truly was a very frightening case for me personally, nevertheless viewing your specialized manner you handled the issue forced me to leap over delight. I’m just happy for the assistance and believe you are aware of a great job that you’re getting into training other individuals via a site. More than likely you haven’t encountered any of us.

Huh? I get hundreds of comments like this every day.

It should be noted that a lot of this spam appears on posts that may be quite old. This particular one appeared on a post that was 2-1/2 years old. This is one reason why bloggers use plugins to automatically turn off the commenting feature on older posts.

Fortunately, spam prevention tools can detect and catch 99% of this kind of spam. I use Akismet on my WordPress site and it does a great job of catching and corralling this garbage so it never has a chance to appear on my blog. If you’re not using a spam prevention tool and are manually going through this crap, what are you waiting for? Don’t you have better things to do with your time?

The other kind of spam is more insidious. It’s posted by a real person and it looks like a legitimate comment. But its sole purpose is to promote a product, service, or Web site — not to engage you or other blog readers in a conversation about the original post’s topic.

In many cases, the spammer doesn’t put any real effort into his comment. It might contain a sentence or two that’s vaguely related to the post. The spam delivery is in the commenter’s name and URL. Rather than being something like “John” or “Mary Smith,” it’ll be something like “John’s Carpet Service” or “Discount Vitamin Shack.” The URL will be the URL for the site John or Mary want to promote. In most cases, the email address will be something that’s likely fake or never checked for incoming mail — usually a Gmail or Yahoo! account — but sometimes a legitimate-looking email account is included.

To me, this is a gray area — is it a legitimate comment or spam? Considering the content and purpose of the comment should guide you. Your site’s comment policy should help; I’ll get to that in a moment.

Trolls

A far worse problem these days is what many people refer to as trolls. Trolls are people who post offensive or controversial commentary on blogs or discussion forums. Their goal is apparently to make themselves look smart or superior at the expensive of you or other commenters. By posting comments, they’re “trolling” for an argument — much like a fisherman might go trolling to catch fish.

This is where good comment moderation is vital to your blog.

You see, if you allow offensive commentary — including personal attacks on yourself or blog commenters — you do two things:

  • You discourage legitimate commenters from sharing their thoughts. After all, they could be the victim of the next troll attack.
  • You encourage more trolling activity by current and future trolls. After all, you let one offensive comment out there, you’re likely to allow others. They see your blog as a good place to troll for new victims.

Is that something you really want?

I have seen too many blogs and forums completely devastated by the comments posted by trolls and the offensive and defensive comments posted in response. Back in the early days of the Internet and newsgroups, we used to refer to this as “flame wars.” There’s nothing useful or productive about the comments by trolls or the resulting flame wars. Why allow them on your blog?

The Freedom of Speech Argument

The biggest defense against firm moderation that would prevent trolling activities is that it’s “censorship” and that you’re violating the commenter’s “freedom of speech.” They often use the phrase “First Amendment Rights.”

Let’s look briefly at the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [emphasis added]

Where exactly does it say that I have to put up with offensive commentary on my blog? All it says is that the government can’t make a law abridging the freedom of speech. I’m not the government, I’m not making a law.

So I don’t think “free speech” is a valid argument. After all, should anyone have the right to say anything they want — no matter how offensive — on your blog?

If people want to spout hate and offensive commentary, they can do it on their own blog.

Creating a Comment Policy

One way to fight back against spammers and trolls is to create and uphold a site comment policy. This policy should clearly state what is and/or isn’t allowed in the comments on your blog. Linking to this policy in an obvious place — or even placing a short version of it right above or below the comment form — will make it clear that you don’t tolerate spam or bad behavior.

Want some examples of good comment policies? Here are a few to give you ideas:

  • An Eclectic Mind. This is the comment policy for my personal blog. It’s a bit wordy — what do you expect from me? — but it does cover all the bases. You might also be interested in another post on my blog, “I Love Blog Comments Here.”
  • Stonekettle Station. Jim Wright doesn’t put up with crap either. That’s the short version of his comment policy. The long version, which address trolls and free speech, can be found here.
  • Whatever. John Scalzi’s comment policy. Simple and to-the-point.
  • Lorelle on WordPress. Lorelle knows more about WordPress blogging than I ever will. Here’s her site’s comment policy. You might also be interested in another post on her blog, “Comments on Comments.”

This topic was also addressed back in 2007 by Lorelle VanFossen in The Blog Herald.

Do you have a site comment policy you want to share with readers here? Post it in the comments for this post.

Maintaining Order

Creating a policy isn’t enough. You also have to maintain it. That means objectively reviewing every comment on your site and deleting the ones that violate the policy.

Yes, deleting them.

My advice is not to edit them, or allow them but reply with a warning, or do anything else. If a comment violates your policy, just delete it.

Don’t even send the commenter an email message telling them that you’ve deleted their message and why. If a commenter lacks the courtesy to be civil and follow your established rules on your blog, does he deserve any courtesy from you?

More important than that is the entire concept of “feeding the trolls.” When you respond in any way to a troll, you encourage more trolling activity. You see, these people just can’t let it go. They see any response as having a victim on the hook and they keep up their trolling behavior.

Ignore them and they will go away. Really.

You need to keep this in mind no matter where you see trolls. If you can’t delete their offensive crap, just ignore it. (Or, if it’s offensive enough, contact the site owner directly and tell him/her what you think and how it makes you feel about their blog/site/forum. A responsible site owner will take care of the problem.)

And if the whole concept of trolls is new to you, I urge you to read the entire “Troll (Internet)” entry on Wikipedia. It’s excellent and it clearly shows how bad these people can be for an Internet community like a blog.

Steps to Take

To sum up, I want to review the steps you might want to take to moderate and control the comments on your blog.

  1. Install and use spam prevention tools. Akismet is the best one (in my opinion) for a WordPress blog. It’s free.
  2. Write and post a site comment policy. Use the ones linked to above to give you ideas.
  3. Set up your blog to require moderation of all comments. On a WordPress blog, you do this in Discussion Settings.
  4. Regularly check for and approve (or delete) new comments. I’ve created a bookmark in my browser to quickly go to the comment moderation panel for each of my sites. I check for comments every morning and sometimes during the day so few comments are ever held in moderation for long.
  5. Resist the urge to respond to trolls on your blog. Don’t respond in comments or in email. You will regret it.
  6. Ignore the comments posted by trolls on other sites and in online forums. Don’t feed the trolls.

Please use the comments for this post to share your thoughts, experiences, and questions about this topic.

How to Disable Hot Linking to Images

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Roll up your sleeves and prepare to edit your .htaccess file.

Important Note:
Messing with your Web site or blog’s .htaccess file is very dangerous. Indeed, if you make an error, the entire site may stop working. Keep that in mind when using these instructions. I will not be held responsible for any problems that result from using this code.

Hot linking is when another Web site links directly to images or other files that reside on your Web server to embed them in their own Web pages or make them accessible to their own site visitors. For example, someone may like an image on your Web site that he/she wants to show off on his/her own. Rather than linking to the page on your site that displays the image, they might use the HTML IMG SRC tag to embed the image on their own site.

There are two problems with this:

  • In many cases, because the image actually appears on the other site, visitors are led to believe that the image belongs to that site’s owner — instead of you. Sometimes the other site owner might provide credit or even a link back to your site. But often times he/she does not. In my book, that’s image theft.
  • Because the image still resides on your server, each time the image is viewed on the other site, your server is required to serve up the image. That uses up your bandwidth. Obviously, if this happens a lot, you might see a slow-down in your site’s response time or your hosting company may begin to charge additional bandwidth fees. In other words, you’re paying to host images on someone else’s site.

The best way to stop hot linking is to modify your site’s .htaccess file to include code that prevents it. In researching this problem, I found several different collections of code. The one that I wound up using as a basis for my final code (shown below) can be found at “How to Disable Hot Linking” on the Online Marketing Blog.

Here’s my code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?<em>mydomain.com</em>/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|gif|png|pdf)$ http://<em>myotherdomain.com/images/StopStealing.jpg</em> [R]

Here’s how it works:

RewriteEngine on

Enables mod_rewrite.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

Allows requests made directly for the image without a referrer. You would include this line if you wanted to allow requests from browsers and other sources without referrers. (I commented out this line in my file, but may allow it.)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?<em>mydomain.com</em>/.*$ [NC]

Allows requests made from your Web site. Obviously, you’d replace mydomain.com with your domain.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]

Allows requests made from Google and search engines. If you don’t want your images to appear in search results, don’t include these two lines.

RewriteRule .(jpg|gif|png)$ http://<em>myotherdomain.com/images/StopStealing.jpg</em> [R]

Prevents images with .jpg, .gif, and .png extensions from appearing on pages with any other referrer. Instead, it shows the image shown here.

If you don’t want to include the image, you can use this line instead to result in a broken image icon:

RewriteRule .(jpg|gif|png)$ - [F]

Keep in mind that using this approach will prevent images from appearing in feed readers, too, so it’s not a good idea if you share your images with others via RSS.

Of course, to add or modify a .htaccess file, you need to know how. That’s beyond the scope of anything I’ll ever write. These instructions assume you already have some idea of how to do this. If you want to learn more about using .htaccess to control access to your Web site, be sure to check out this tutorial.

One more thing…please don’t expect me to help you debug your .htaccess file. Believe me, I know only enough about .htaccess to be dangerous; you would be better off without my help. Good luck!

Three Productivity Tips from a Long-Time Blogger

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A guest post for WordCast.

About this Post
I wrote this post to complement my participation in a Blog Productivity panel podcast for WordCast. I was invited by Lorelle (of WordPress fame), and I really enjoyed participating. If you listen to the podcast, it’ll soon become clear that I’m the “odd man out” (so to speak) in that I do things a bit differently than the rest of the pack. The podcast is full of great tips from all panelists and definitely worth a listen if you’re serious about blogging. This post appeared on the WordCast site earlier in the week.

I might not be the most influential blogger you’ve ever heard of — if you’ve heard of me at all. Or the most prolific. But I’m probably one of the most experienced: I’ve been blogging since October 15, 2003.

Still, I was extremely pleased to be asked to join a panel of expert bloggers for a recent WordCast podcast about blogging productivity. The folks at WordCast asked me to follow-up with a blog post sharing some of my tips. I can’t help thinking that my co-panelist’s tips were better, but here’s what I have to offer.

1. Create and Stick to a Blogging Schedule

One of the most important things about keeping a blog is adding new content regularly. “Regularly” is a tricky word. It doesn’t have to mean every day. It just means often enough to keep your readers checking in for more.

For example, suppose your life gives you enough free time that you can post once or twice a day for a few weeks or months. Suddenly, however, life takes as turn and that blogging time is gone — or you get bored with your blog and put it on the back burner. Go a week without posting something new and the folks who check in regularly for your words of wisdom may stop checking.

While I realize this is an extreme example, it does illustrate my point: regular readers will pick up on the rhythm on your posting and expect you to stick with it. When you don’t, they move on.

The way to prevent this from happening is to create a posting goal and schedule time to write. Perhaps you think twice a week is a good frequency. Pick two days a week — Tuesday and Friday? — pick a time that works for you — at breakfast with your morning coffee? — and blog on schedule. Make it part of your routine, part of your life.

I try to get a new blog post out at least five days a week. My schedule has me sitting in front of my laptop with my morning coffee every morning I can. Since I’m an early riser — usually up by 6 AM — I usually get my blog post done before I start my work day.

Got something coming up that’s likely to break your schedule? Vacation? Business trip? Family commitments? Write extra posts when you can and schedule them to appear in the future. This is particularly handy if your topic is not time-sensitive or you know you’ll be unable to blog on schedule in the future. Here are two suggestions:

  • Long posts can often be cut it into multiple parts with each part scheduled to appear on a different day. Not only does this stretch a single work out to fill a posting schedule, but if done properly, your readers will make sure they come back for the subsequent parts.
  • Do double-duty and write two posts at a sitting, scheduling one of them to appear in the future. If you’re able to write a lot very quickly, you can actually write a week’s worth of content at one sitting. No one has to know that each day’s new post was actually written some time ago.

2. Take Notes

How do you know what to blog about? One way is to take notes. As ideas and thoughts come to you — either from the workings of your own mind or from something you read online or heard in a conversation — jot them down. If you spend enough time thinking and reading and listening, you should be able to accumulate plenty of ideas.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t use software or web-based tools such as Evernote to organize notes and clippings. I use paper. I keep spiral-bound notebooks on my desk and in my computer bag and make notes as things come to me. When I’ve processed the note — blogged about it, made the call, tracked down the Web site, ordered the product, etc. — I recycle the paper. The huge file containing all my thoughts and ideas is my blog.

The point is, it doesn’t matter how you take notes. The important thing is to take them. Keep track of the little ideas that pop into your head when you’re in the shower or driving. Write down the key words of a conversation that’ll help you remember what you found so intriguing. Then, when you’re ready to compose a blog post, you’ll have most of the material you need to get it written.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not knocking software tools. I just can’t be bothered climbing up the learning curve to use them effectively. Pen and paper works for me.

3. Automate!

There are lots of software tools and solutions out there to help automate tasks. After all, isn’t that what computers are for? To do the work and make our lives easier?

Here are three examples of tools I use to automate blogging-related tasks:

  • Delicious with Postalicious. Delicious is a bookmarking Web site. You read a Web page, want to remember it, and create a Delicious bookmark with its URL and a description and tags you specify. I’ve been using Delicious for years, since it could be found only at http://del.icio.us. Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that creates a blog post based on your new Delicious entries and the descriptions you provide. It then automatically posts the links entry to your blog at a predetermined time. You can find plenty of examples on my blog. Postalicious also works with other services, such as ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes. I rely on this combination of tools to collect and share Web-based content that I found interesting and want to share with my readers. The format isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly good enough for my needs. Oh, and one more thing: I use the RSS feed for my Delicious bookmarks to generate a list of recently bookmarked pages in the sidebar of my blog.
  • Twitterfeed with Twitter. Twitter is an incredible tool for communicating short snippets of information with other people all over the world. (If you haven’t heard of it or tried it, crawl out from under that rock, brush the dust and cobwebs off your clothes, and join the rest of the social networking community.) Twitterfeed is a Web-based service that scans your blog’s RSS feed and tweets links to your new posts. This is a great, automatic way to tell your Twitter followers about new content on your blog.
  • Feedburner’s Email Subscriptions. Feedburner is a service that modifies your RSS feed to add features. Although it was started as an independent service, it’s now part of Google, so you need a free Google account to take advantage of its features. The Email Subscriptions feature creates e-mail messages based on your RSS feed and sends them out to subscribers. The subscription list is maintained inside Feedburner, so you don’t have to deal with it; users can add and remove themselves without bothering you. This is a great way for folks who want to read your content regularly to get it on a timely basis without using RSS readers. Best of all, once you set it up, it’s automatic.

Conclusion

When thinking about blog productivity, it all comes down to working smart. Make blogging part of your life schedule. Keep notes about the topics you find interesting so you have plenty of topics to write about when you’re ready to blog. And automate tasks whenever possible.

These are just three tips. Give it some thought — or read the blog posts of my co-panelists here — for more.

About the Author

Maria Langer is a freelance writer who has been writing about computers and the Internet since 1990. She’s the co-author of the first-ever book on WordPress and has since authored three WordPress video titles for Lynda.com. Maria’s also a commercial helicopter pilot and serious amateur photographer. Her blog, An Eclectic Mind, can be found at aneclecticmind.com.

Got a Keyboard? Use it.

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A blog post should be more than just screenshots of what other people Tweeted.

This morning, as I sat drinking my coffee, I began my usual ritual of checking out some of the links tweeted overnight by the people I follow. One of them was about the iPad. Interested in the iPad as my future ebook reader, I followed the link.

I wound up on a blog post that consisted primarily of screenshots of Twitter. The blogger had posted a question on Twitter about the iPad and then sat back and captured screenshots of the responses as they were tweeted.

I call that lazy blogging.

It was also extremely tedious to read. So tedious, in fact, that I stopped reading after the first scroll down. I did continue scrolling to see if there was some content added by the blogger, but there was so little of it that I wound up simply closing the browser window and getting on with my day.

And then I realized how much it bugged me that there was someone out there passing off screenshots of Twitter responses as a blog “post.”

There is so much crap on the Internet today. Huge quantities of it. I don’t “surf” the net. My Web activity is limited to looking up things I need to know about and following what appears to be interesting links that I receive from friends and business associates verbally, via e-mail, and via Twitter. I don’t want to spend my day wading through the crap online. I want the good stuff.

A blogger should not simply regurgitate what’s readily available on the Web. If I wanted to know what Twitter users thought of the iPad, I’d use Twitter’s built-in search feature — which is also part of Nambu, my preferred Twitter client — and set up a search. I’d then read the results myself. I don’t need to go to a blog to read the same stuff. As screenshots, for Pete’s sake! Hell, if I were at home with my miserably slow Internet connection, the damn page would have taken five minutes to load!

A blogger’s job is to both inform and provide analysis. A summary sentence at the top of 20 screenshots that simply says, “Many people think lack of multi-tasking is a deal breaker,” doesn’t do much for me. And I certainly don’t need to see those 20 screenshots. I get it. You’re not making this up. All these Twitter users said it. I guess it must be true.

And it’s immensely ironic that this post was retweeted. As if it had value. WTF?

My point: if you call yourself a blogger and want to add something of value to the Web, dust off your keyboard and use it.

On Becoming a “Power Blogger”

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I define a new [to me] phrase.

Last week, I was one of four guest panelists on the WordCast podcast. The topic was blog productivity — tips and tricks for blogging more efficiently — and a phrase I’d never heard before came up in the discussion: power blogger.

Let me take a few steps back before I move forward. Although I’ve written extensively about blogging from the blogger point of view and I’ve also co-authored and authored various WordPress training materials (books and videos), I’m not someone who keeps up-to-date with the world of blogging. I don’t know the buzzwords or phrases, I don’t follow the hot trends. I just obtain the tools, use them the way they work for me, and try to publish new blog posts regularly. Along the way, I provide a sprinkling of advice for bloggers in my own blog posts.

So the phrase power blogger was brand new to me.

And meaningless.

When the question, “What advice can you give to people who want to become power bloggers?” came up, I felt a tingling of stage fright. Surely I’d sound like an idiot if I admitted I had no idea what the phrase meant.

Fortunately, another panelist spoke up. I listened carefully to glean meaning from his response. And what I learned was that he — and the others — considered the quantity of blog posts a major component of power blogging. By their definition — at least one post a day — I was a power blogger!

I sure don’t feel like one.

When it was my turn to speak, I proposed my own definition of power blogger. I don’t remember the exact words, but it went something like this:

The number of blog posts a blogger publishes should have nothing to do with whether he’s a power blogger. Instead, it should be the influence the blogger has over his readership and beyond. What’s important is whether a blog post makes a difference in the reader’s life. Does it teach? Make the reader think? Influence his decisions? If a blogger can consistently do any of that, he’s a power blogger.

I recall comparing Twitter — which is, after all, “microblogging” — to blogging. Someone can tweet dozens of times a day, but if there isn’t any value in what he’s tweeting, what good is it? There are plenty of bloggers out there simply rehashing the same material, over and over, without adding anything new to the mix. They might post five or ten times a day. But if it isn’t worth reading, how can you consider them power bloggers?

And I guess that’s the advice I want to share in this post: If you’re serious about blogging, don’t go for quantity. Go for quality.

Make a difference with what you post.

Blogging Basics: Comment Spam, Part II

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Part II: When Comments Go Wrong

In the first part of this series, I explained what comments and pingbacks are and how they can benefit your blog. If you don’t know this stuff, go back and read that first. In this part of the series, I’ll explain how and why the comments feature can go wrong and list three tools for WordPress that can fight it.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam

While your blog’s readers like the comments feature because it enables them to participate in your blog, spammers like it, too. It gives them the ability to share their spammy comments and links on your blog.

Comment Spam ExampleComment spam is a terrible problem for bloggers. If left uncontrolled, it can quickly take over your blog by filling post comments with a lot of garbage — some of of obscene — including links to Web sites you probably don’t want to advertise for. Your blog visitors will have to wade through all this junk to find real comments. If the problem is bad enough, the probably won’t bother looking. If the comment spam is offensive enough, they might not visit your blog again.

Pingback SpamComment spam’s close cousin is pingback spam, which is relatively new to blogging. In pingback spam, someone else’s blog links back to yours, placing a pingback link to that blog in your blog. The purpose may be to get your site visitors to come to that blog, or, if you have nofollow disabled, to improve the site’s Google page rank.

Both comment spam and pingback spam can be automatically generated. For comment spam, spambot programs can automatically find comment forms on a blog, fill in the fields, and submit the spam comments. Pingback spam can be created through the use of feed “scraping” tools that pull parts of posts from your blog and posts them to the spammer’s blog, along with a link to yours. Because of automation, so there’s no limit to how much spam can be sent to your blog.

Spam Stopping Tools

Fortunately, there’s help. Many WordPress programmers are out there, fighting the same war against spam that you are. They have the skills to write plugins that can identify spam and quarantine or delete it so it doesn’t appear on your blog.

While there are numerous spam prevention tools out there for WordPress users, I have personal experience with three of them:

  • Aksimet, which is part of WordPress.com and comes as a plugin with self-hosted WordPress blogs, is created and maintained by the folks at Automattic, makers of WordPress. It’s fully integrated into WordPress and is extremely effective. I tell you more about how to set up and use Akismet in Part IV of this series.

    • Spam Karma, by Dr. Dave, is another powerful spam prevention tool. I used this exclusively for a while and it caught all the spam that appeared on my site. The only reason I stopped using it is because I switched to Akismet.

  • Bad Behavior is a plugin by Michael Hampton. It attempts to head off spam by determining whether a hit to a blog post is by a human or a spambot. Spambots are automatically denied access. One side benefit of this approach is a reduction in MySQL activity due to spambot access — that’s why I initially began using it. I used Bad Behavior in conjunction with one of the other spam prevention tools listed here for some time before trusting Akismet to do the whole job. The reason: Bad Behavior sometimes records false positives, making it impossible for certain real people to post comments. This problem occurs rarely, but since Akismet seems to be doing the job on its own, I prefer not to take the chance. (Note to Michael if you stop by to read this: if I got this wrong, please do comment to set me straight.)

I should note here that both Akismet and Spam Karma can “learn” about spam based on how you resolve comments you manually moderate. That’s why it’s important to properly identify any false positives or missed spam.

In the next post of this series, I’ll explain how you can identify comment spam — even when it doesn’t look like spam.

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Blogging Basics: Comment Spam, Part I

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Part I: Understanding Comments and Pingpacks

One of the main things that differentiate a blog from a Web site is the ability of readers to interact with what you post. This is done primarily through the use of comments.

Comment Basics

Most blogging software supports reader commenting. Typically, a comment form appears at the bottom of a post. Readers can enter their comments about the post, along with their name, e-mail address, and Web or blog URL. When the form is submitted, the comment is added to the post.

Post with CommentsThe screenshot here shows what a post on my blog, An Eclectic Mind, looks like with a few comments added, as well as a comment form.

Most blogging software packages offer the blogger options for handling comments. WordPress, for example offers several options:

  • Comments can be enabled or disabled by default or set on a post-by-post basis.
  • Commenter e-mail address can be required for a comment to be submitted.
  • Blog registration can be required for a comment to be submitted.
  • Comments can be held for moderation or automatically moderated based on a handful of options, including moderation and blacklist words or phrases.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Pingbacks (or trackbacks) are part of the commenting arena. A pingback happens when another blogger writes a post in which he links directly back to your post. He may have quoted your post in his and is linking back to the source. Or maybe he just wants to tell his readers how good your post was and send them over to your blog to read it. If his blogging software supports pingbacks or he has manually entered the link as a trackback, a special comment is sent to your blog with a link back to his blog.

Technically, a trackback is different from a pingback. A pingback is automated. The other blogger’s blogging platform must be capable of creating the pingback comment. Before automated pingbacks were widely supported, blogging platforms included a trackback feature that required the blogger to manually enter a linked post’s URL in a field when creating his post. Nowadays, these two terms are often used interchangeably.

In WordPress, you must have pingbacks enabled for your blog posts in order for WordPress to receive them. Pingbacks can appear with comments or, if the blog’s theme separates comments from pingbacks, they can appear separately. For example, my blog’s theme separates comments and pingbacks under different “tabs.”

Pingbacks look different, too. Instead of including a blogger’s name and comment, they include the name of the post that links to your post and a short excerpt surrounded by [...] characters. Here’s what a pingback looks like on a post in this blog:

Pingback Example

Comments, Pingbacks, and Reader Participation

It’s pretty easy to see how comments encourage reader participation. Comments give readers an opportunity to add or respond to your post. If enough readers comment and you respond, a conversation gets started. Sometimes that conversation can have more value than your original post.

For example, one of the most popular posts on this site is about a change in iTunes that affected how podcasts play back on an iPod. I identified the problem and created a workaround. A bunch of readers commented. One of the readers commented by sharing an AppleScript he’d written to automate my workaround. Another reader fine-tuned that script so it ran more efficiently. To this day, I use that script as my workaround. You can see the post and read the comments here.

Pingbacks also encourage reader participation, but in a less direct way. Suppose you read this post and think that your readers might benefit from it. You write a post on your blog that refers to it and adds your own comments. When you link to this post from your blog, a link to your post appears on this post. So readers reading comments here can go to your post to see what you’ve written about this topic.

Unfortunately, not everyone uses comments and pingbacks as they’re intended. The result is comment and pingback spam. I’ll discuss those in the next post of this series.

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Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part IV

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Displaying a list of your recent Viddler videos in your WordPress blog.

If you start using Viddler regularly — either to create video blog entries as discussed in the previous article of this series or to simply get video content online — you might want to make those videos accessible from within your WordPress blog. Fortunately, there’s a WordPress plugin that makes this very easy: viddlerRSS.

The ViddlerRSS plugin works like most other WordPress plugins. Drop it in your plugins folder and activate it. (You can learn more about how to do that in our WordPress book, so don’t expect to find details here.) Then open your WordPress dashboard and choose Options > viddlerRSS. Enter your Username in the appropriate box, select the number of videos to display and, if desired, enter the HTML code you want before and after each video thumbnail. Then click Update viddlerRSS.

viddlerRSS Options

Now roll up your sleeves and open the template file where you want to insert the Viddler video thumbnails. (Need help modifying theme files? You can learn about that to do that in our WordPress book, too.) In most cases, this will be your sidebar.php template. Insert the following code into the file where you want the thumbnails to appear: <?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>

Or you can get fancy like I did and put some intelligence into it, in case you ever need to disable the viddlerRSS plugin. Here’s the code I use, which includes a heading and other formatting settings:

<?php if (function_exists('get_viddlerrss')) { ?>
<li>
<h2>My Latest Viddler Videos</h2>
<?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>

Save the changes to your template file.

My Viddler VideosNow check your blog to see the results of your efforts. As shown here, I’ve got viddlerRSS set up to display thumbnails for my most recent three videos in my blog’s sidebar. Pointing to a video’s thumbnail displays the title of the video, which can help people decide whether they want to view it. Clicking a thumbnail image opens the video on the Viddler site.

Easy enough, right?

The next (and last) article in this series will explain how you can include a video commenting feature in your WordPress blog. Stay tuned!

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part III

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Recording and posting a video.

If you have a camera — like a built-in iSight, WebCam, or DV camera connected via a cable — you can record video using tools on the Viddler site. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to get a video blog entry recorded and online.

Recording a Video

Here are the steps to record a video:

  1. Log into your Viddler account at http://www.viddler.com/.
  2. Click the Record button in the green navigation bar (or elsewhere, wherever you see it).
  3. Recording VideoThe Record from WebCam screen appears with an Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog atop it. Click the Allow button so Flash can access your audio and video input devices.
  4. Recording VideoIn the Select Quality dialog, choose an option suited to your connection speed. I usually choose Medium because I have a relatively slow (512 Kbps) Internet connection. Then click Okay.The screen should show an image of whatever your connected camera is looking at. In my case, I’m using a built-in iSight Camera on my 24-inch iMac, so it’s looking at me:
    Recording Video
  5. Check the Audio, Video, and Quality settings. In the illustration above, it’s using my externally connected iSight for audio, which is wrong. I want it to use the Built-in Microphone, so I select it from the pop-up menu. My built-in iSight camera is identified as a USB Video Class Video — it works, so I won’t argue. I believe the external iSight connected to my computer does not appear in the menu because it’s being used by other software (Evocam, which produces my WebCam).
  6. When you’re ready to record, click the red Record button. The status bar animates with a diagonal red stripe as you record. When you’re finished, click the Red button again.
  7. Wait while Viddler saves your video. It’ll display a status arrow thingie as it works. When it’s finished, it shows the poster frame of the video. If you wait long enough, it’ll play back to you:
    Recording Video
  8. If you like what you see, click the Save button. If you don’t, hit that red Record button again to discard the video and record a new one.

Please remember that I simply cannot provide details about every single camera that you might be using with your computer and I can’t offer troubleshooting assistance if you can’t get this to work. If you have problems, consult Viddler’s online support options. Although you can post a question in this post’s Comments, be aware that I won’t reply if I don’t have an answer. Someone else, however, may have the information you seek.

Setting Video Options

When you save a video, it appears in a Recorded video window:

Recording Video

There are a few things you should set for it:

  • Click the Edit link beside the name of the video (“Recorded video”) and enter a more appropriate name for the video. Don’t forget to click the Save link beneath the new name to save it.
  • If desired, enter tags in the Tags field on the right side of the video. You’ll need to enter each tag separately and click the Add Tag button after each one. (I’m not big on tagging, so I don’t usually do this.)
  • Under Sharing Options, choose Everyone. After all, if you’re going to put this on your blog, you want everyone to be able to see it, right? If a Save Changes button appears there, be sure to click it.

Posting the Video on Your Blog

This is where the setup covered in Part II of this series pays off.

  1. Click the Blog This button under the video.
  2. In the list of blogs that appears beneath the video, click the link for the blog you want to add it to.
  3. Fill in the blog post form that appears:
    Recording Video
    The title will be the title of the blog post. The Post is the text that will appear in the post with the video. (I got fancy with some HTML to link to the first blog post in this series.) You can select a radio button at the bottom of the form to determine whether the video should appear above or below the post text. (I usually choose below.)
  4. Click the Send button. A message should confirm that the video has been successfully posted to your blog. Here’s what mine looks like:
    Recording Video

Now wasn’t that easy?

I should note here that you can use the Blog This button under any public video you see on the Viddler site. So if another Viddler user creates a cool video you want to share with your blog’s readers, you can add it to your blog, along with some comments, as discussed here.

Next up: Displaying an archive of your recent Viddler videos in your WordPress blog.

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part II

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Setting blog options on Viddler.

Once you’ve set up your Viddler account, you’re ready to set a few options that’ll make blogging from it easy.

  1. Log into your Viddler account at http://www.viddler.com/.
  2. Click the Options button near the top of the page, under the “Hello, yourname” greeting.
  3. In the Account Options screen, click the Blog Settings link. You should see something like this, although there won’t be any blogs listed for you.
    Blog Settings
  4. Click the + Add Blog button to display configuration fields.
  5. Enter your blog’s name in the Blog Name box and select the type of blog from the Blog Type drop-down list. The entry area expands to offer options applicable to your type of blog. Here’s what it looks like for a WordPress blog:
    Viddler WordPress Settings
  6. Fill in the rest of the fields. The Blog API Endpoint is the URL to your blog’s Home page followed by /xmlrpc.php. You should know the Username and Password.
  7. To prevent having to enter your password every time you send a Viddler video to your blog, turn on the Remember Password button.
  8. Click Submit.
  9. Viddler checks the information you entered. If it is correct and provides access to your blog, a green “Success!” message appears. Click the Awesome button. The blog is added to a list under Your Blogs.

You can repeat this process for as many blogs as you have access to. And, as you may have noticed, Viddler supports many different blog types, including TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type, Manilla, and Vox. So even if you’re not a WordPress user, you can use this feature. And yes, it does work with WordPress.com based blogs — not just the server install blogs.

What does this do for you? It sets up your account so that whenever you see a Viddler video that you want to embed in your blog, your account information is already provided and you’re good to go.

Next up: Recording a video on Viddler.

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part I

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What’s this all about?

One of the things I’ve been following from arm’s length is the audio and video blogging phenomena. I’m talking about sites like Utterz, Seesmic, and Viddler.

I’ve tried all three and until I tried Viddler, I couldn’t get excited about any of them. But Viddler has a few features that make video blogging easy and fun — primarily because it works so well with WordPress.

In this series of articles, I’ll explain how you can use Viddler to create video content with any compatible camera attached to your computer and get that content on your blog. And, if you’re a WordPress user, I’ll tell you about two Viddler plugins you can use to make it easy for your blog readers to find your video content on Viddler — even if you didn’t post it on your blog — and even leave video comments for you.

What is Viddler?

Viddler is an online service that enables you to upload or record videos that can then be shared with others. It’s a bit like YouTube, only classier and used by people who want to communicate rather than show off entertainment-based content.

At least that’s my take on it.

Viddler uses Flash to capture video from a camera attached to your computer. It works great with my iMac’s built-in iSight camera and microphone, as well as the iMage camera I bought for traveling with my old PowerBook.

But you don’t have to capture video directly to Viddler. You can take an existing video file and upload it. Viddler supports .mov, .mpg, .wmv, .avi, and .m4v formats. You can’t, however, upload television shows or other material that’s likely to be copyrighted. Viddler doesn’t have the same deep pockets as YouTube and probably doesn’t want to be sued. Besides, you shouldn’t be sharing that stuff anyway.

Once content is on Viddler’s server, it can be set as private, public, or available to just your friends. (Like most social networking sites, you can create a network of friends to share videos you don’t want the general public to see.) You can also share your videos with others on other social networking sites or by embedding them in your blog or e-mail messages.

Getting Started

Viddler Sign UpOf course, to use Viddler, you need an account. Go to http://www.viddler.com/ and click the big green Sign Me Up button. Then follow the prompts to create a user ID and password. You’ll have to provide a real e-mail address, since Viddler will be sending you a confirmation e-mail. Once you get that e-mail, click the link in it to finish setting up your account.

You can now create or upload videos. I’ll discuss both of those tasks in future installments of this series.

Meanwhile, if you have a Viddler account, why not take a moment to share the info about it with us? Use the Comments link or form for this post to provide your Viddler username so we can check out some of your videos.

Deleting Spam from Your WordPress Blog

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Marking it as spam isn’t enough to get rid of it.

One of the things I like about WordPress is that it’s impossible to know everything about it. And today I learned something new.

I learned that the spam comments that I marked as spam had not been deleted from my WordPress database. They were just marked as spam so they wouldn’t appear in posts.

How did I discover this? I had to export all blog posts from An Eclectic Mind to a special WordPress-compatible XML file that contained all blog posts and comments. I had to weed out all the posts and comments I didn’t want to import into my new Maria’s Guides site. And that’s when I found all the nasty spam I’d marked for the past 4 years.

Now don’t think this was all of the spam. It was only the spam that was marked as spam using WordPress’s comment moderation feature. When the comment spam situation got out of control, I enlisted the help of the Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 plugins. Bad Behavior prevents potential spambots from posting comments at all. Spam Karma catches 95% of the spam that gets past Bad Behavior. I’m left with less than 10 spam comments a day. Not bad when you consider that Bad Behavior alone caught 17,067 spam attempts in the past seven days. The way I see it, anyone with a relatively well-Googled blog who doesn’t use at least one of these tools is doing a lot more comment moderation than they need to.

So there I was, halfway through the process of deleting non-book-related posts and their comments from an XML file, when I realized that much of the file’s contents was spam that wouldn’t appear when I imported it anyway. And that’s when I started thinking about how much database space was devoted to this spam.

The DB-Manager Plugin

Database ContentsI use Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan’s DB-Manager plugin. This plugin puts MySQL database features into the WordPress administration panel. This is a must-use for anyone who needs to get into their database and learn more about it or make changes to it.

So I went into the plugin’s interface and learned that my blog had 1900+ comments. I knew that only 1400+ comments were actually appearing in the blog. That made 500+ spam entries sitting in my database, taking up disk space and making my backups much larger than they needed to be.

(Note: The screenshot here shows the database contents after removing the spam. If I’d known I was going to write about it here, I would have taken more screenshots.)

I wanted them out.

Help on the WordPress Forums

I found help on the WordPress forums. They really can be helpful if you enter the right search phrase.

The topic was Support › deleting over 10,000 spam comments without using moderation page. The story was, this poor soul had left his blog alone for a week and, when he returned, found 10,000 comments on it. He wanted to delete them.

A member named bindanaku came to his rescue with a MySQL query:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='0'

This assumes that you want to delete all comments that haven’t been moderated. This was not the case for me. I wanted to delete all comments that had been moderated as spam. I assumed that the correct query for my situation would be:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='spam'

I was right.

Back to DB-Manager

Enter a MySQL QueryI went to the DB-Manager administration panel and clicked the Run SQL Query button. That gave me a window where I could enter my query, as shown here. When I clicked Run, I got a message that the query was successful.

Sure enough, when I checked the Database info (see previous screenshot), I could see that 500+ comments had been removed from the database. But the table size was the same.

I used DB-Manager’s Optimize DB feature to optimize the database. That dropped about 400K from the table size.

I should note here that if you’re more familiar with editing a MySQL database, you can do the query with your normal editing tool. I don’t mess with my MySQL database much. I’m always afraid of screwing it up. (Call me a wimp — I don’t care.) That’s why I use DB-Manager.

Conclusion

While all this might seem like a lot of work to get rid of 400K of file size, the situation could be worse on your blog. My blog has about 1500 posts spanning about four years. I’ve been using Bad Behavior and Spam Karma for at least two of those years. So the majority of these old spams were from very old posts. If you don’t use any spam protection software and are manually moderating comments, you could have far more of these spam comments in your database. And since many of them were lengthy listings of porn and ringtone and other URLs, they were quite large in size. If you have a lot of these in your database, it could be taking up a lot of space — perhaps even more than your actual blog posts.

Do I recommend going through this process? It’s up to you.

Fixing Post By E-Mail In WordPress 2.2

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And some other information you might find useful.

I finally upgraded my personal blog to the latest version of WordPress, which is version 2.2.2 (as I write this). In addition to breaking a handful of my plugins — not a big deal, since I was able to replace just about all of them with newer, better versions — it also broke WordPress’s post by e-mail feature, which we discuss on pages 64-66 of our WordPress book.

The Post by E-Mail Feature and How It Broke

If you’re not familiar with this feature, you might want to be. It’s pretty cool. It enables you to send an e-mail message to a special account you set up for WordPress to check. When WordPress finds a message there, it automatically posts the content of the message to your blog, using a predefined category that you choose. The message subject becomes the post title.

In WordPress 2.2, WordPress simply stopped seeing and importing the body of the message. As a result, you’d wind up with properly titled but otherwise empty post.

The Fix

Some research on WordPress.org uncovered a post which explained the problem and offered patch code for the class-pop3.php file. This file, which resides in the wp-includes folder of a WordPress server installation, is responsible for processing posts by e-mail.

I manually replaced the bad code with the new code in my file and tested the results. It worked fine.

Rather than fiddling around with code like I did, you can simply download the revised file here. UnZip it and use it to replace your current class-pop3.php file. (If you’re smart, you’ll save a copy of your current file — perhaps by renaming it right in the folder in which it resides — before replacing it.)

This file definitely works on my WordPress 2.2.2 setup. It might not work with earlier or later versions of WordPress or on your setup if it has been heavily modified, so try it at your own risk.

A Neat Trick

While I was researching the problem, I picked up a neat trick in the WordPress Codex.

If you use post by e-mail, you probably know that your e-mail messages won’t be posted unless WordPress checks for mail. As we wrote in our book (on page 66), there are at least two ways to do this: manually by opening a specific Web browser page or automatically using a plugin.

But there is another way to automate the process and it’s pretty easy for WordPress novices who aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and modify a template file. Simply include the following code in your theme’s footer.php file:

<iframe src="http://<em>yourblogdomain</em>/<em>wordpressinstalldir</em>/wp-mail.php" name="mailiframe" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title=""></iframe>

This forces WordPress to check for mail every time someone loads any page on your site.

The drawback to this is that if your site is very busy, your server will be checking pretty often for e-mail messages. But it seems to me that you could include the same code on another template page that’s used less often, perhaps category.php (if present) or archive.php or page.php.

Hopefully, you’ll find this information useful. As usual, comments are welcome. Use the Comments link or form below to share your thoughts with me and other visitors.

Web Site vs. Blog

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What’s the Difference?

Today I got a phone call from our local newspaper’s “business advocate” — the guy who writes stories about business. He was researching an article about blogging and figured that I was the most active blogger — if not the only blogger — in town, so I might be able to to provide some information about it. He wasn’t aware that I’d co-authored a book about WordPress blogging software (WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide) in 2006 and he probably wasn’t aware that I wrote Putting Your Small Business on the Web back in 2000. He probably also doesn’t know that I’ve written four books about Web authoring software (various versions of PageMill, now defunct) and that I’ve been building and managing Web sites since 1994 (although I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living).

We stumbled a bit in our conversation. He referred to my Web site, wickenburg-az.com, as a blog. (The site has been around since 1999, predating the blogging phenomena by at least 3 to 4 years.) I responded that it wasn’t a blog, that it was a Web site built with blogging software. And then he asked me what the difference was.

I had to think about it. What is the difference between a Web site and a blog?

They’re very much alike.

Let’s take a look at the similarities.

  • Web sites and blogs are both published on the Web and can be read with any Web browser. This gives them the same basic look and feel and similar user experiences. Web sites built with blogging software can look and feel just like a blog, even if that’s not what they are intended to be.
  • They depend on good, useful content. Web site visitors and blog readers come to read content. If the content is good and meets their needs, they’ll be back for more. If the content sucks, they won’t.

But they are different.

Of course, I needed to explain how they were different — not how they were the same. The response I came up with centered around the purpose of visitors coming to to the site, but there are more differences.

  • Web site visitors come to a site to look for specific information. That information does not need to be new. It just needs to be what the visitor is looking for. For example, I visit the HP Web site when I need a new driver for one of my printers. I know it’ll be there and I don’t care if it’s been there for five years. People visit wickenburg-az.com to get basic information about Wickenburg: what it’s like, what to do there, etc. But blog readers visit or subscribe to blogs to get fresh information or insight on topics that are important to them. I read ProBlogger, for example, because it has timely articles that can help me understand how to be a better blogger. People visit aneclecticmind.com to read articles like this one about blogging, or other articles about flying, or even other articles about what it’s like to live in a place like Wickenburg — all from my point of view.
  • Blogs tend to be more opinion-based than Web sites. Sure, HP is going to tell you on their Web site that their printers are the best, but what would you expect? On my blog, I’ll tell you what I think about my HP printer and compare it to other printers I might own or have experience with. I’ll also tell you what I think of Apple Geniuses or local restaurants or life revolving around the Internet. (Although some locals might find this hard to believe, I keep most of my negative opinions of Wickenburg out of wickenburg-az.com. Most.) The opinion aspect makes blogs more personal than a Web site.
  • Blogs rely on fresh content. It’s commonly accepted that a blogger should post at least 3 to 5 new entries a week. Web sites, on the other hand, are more static and don’t require as much updating. Their visitors don’t expect it, either.

Does it matter?

Who knows? But it’s made me think about blogging a bit more than usual lately. And I’m sure it will lead to a few more articles here about what makes a blog a blog in the near future.

5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts More Readable

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Learn five easy tricks to help pull readers into your blog posts.

Okay, so you’ve written an article for your blog and you’re all ready to publish it online. You’re confident that the article’s content is well-written. And you’re sure it will appeal to your blog’s regular readers.

But wait! Before you put it out to be read by the world, have you done what you can to make it more readable?

By readable, I mean formatted in such a way that visitors will be drawn into its content and want to read every word. Or have you simply composed 20 paragraphs of good, solid information, formatted as big solid blocks of text?

No matter what blogging tool you use to publish your blog, you should have access to the standard array of formatting features available in HTML. In this article, I’ll explain how and why you should use them.

Break Up Long Paragraphs

What’s less attractive on a Web page than solid blocks of text? Long paragraphs of unbroken text can intimidate readers. They look unapproachable, like a college textbook. (For me, they bring to mind the textbook in my college tax accounting course, which further reminds me of two semesters of boring hell on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.)

Break up long paragraphs at logical points. This will require some writing skill, since you can’t arbitrarily chop paragraphs up — each one must still communicate a complete thought. But shorter paragraphs are a lot less intimidating than long ones — a point that applies to sentences, too (although I can’t seem to get that one into my thick skull).

And one more thing about this: be sure to use a space between paragraphs (usually with the <p> tag rather than the <br /> tag, if hand coding is required). On the Web, that’s the standard way to end one paragraph and begin another. Just starting a new line isn’t going to break the paragraph at all — at least not in the eyes of the reader.

Use Headings

Headings cue the reader about the content of paragraphs that follow them. For example, my Use Headings heading here tells you that I’m going to talk about headings in this paragraph and, likely the few that follow up until the next heading. Readers can scan your article’s headings to get a better idea of what the article covers.

Of course, there are two kinds of headings. There’s the kind that actually reflects what’s in the paragraphs they head — that’s what I’m using in this article. And then there’s the kind that doesn’t quite explain what the following paragraphs are about, but are humorous or witty. Both types can work, but for serious content, I recommend the first type.

Headings can also help with search engine optimization (SEO), but not being an SEO expert, I can’t elaborate much about this. I seem to recall reading that h1 and h2 level headings are more effective for SEO than other lower levels. I use h3 because that’s how formatting is set up on my blog and I’m not terribly concerned with SEO. If SEO is very important to you, you might want to look into this claim. Of course, for headings to be effective at all in SEO, they must be coded as headings using <h2> and </h2> tags (or other level tags as appropriate) around them. The appearance of text coded as headings will vary depending on settings in your style.css file or other style information for your blog. (And now we’re getting a little more technical than I wanted to get in this article.)

Format Lists as Lists

If any paragraph in your article includes a list of four or more items that are longer than four or more words each, for heaven’s sake, format them as a list!

There’s nothing so boring or potentially confusing as long lists within a paragraph, especially when those lists include explanations, commas, and semicolons. Why worry about proper in-paragraph list formatting when you can simply create a bulleted or numbered list that’s clear and easy to read?

Lists, like headings, are also extremely scannable, making it easy for readers to get an idea of the content they include. They draw the reader in by giving them information in bite-sized chunks. Bold formatting used at the beginning of a list item (see below) can act as a heading, letting the reader know that an explanation or more information about the item follows.

In summary, lists can do the following for you:

  • Break up long blocks of text. Long lists in a paragraph make big, fat, intimidating blocks of text. Isn’t this much nicer?
  • Make one point easy to distinguish from the next. Since you (and your readers) don’t have to worry about how list items are separated (comma or semi-colon?) you don’t have to worry about someone misunderstanding list items.
  • Take advantage of built-in formatting options. I’m not just talking about standard bullets and hanging indents here. As you can see in this list, a blog’s style.css file can include instructions for graphic bullets or other fancy formatting.
  • Give your readers important points quickly. By presenting information in an easily scannable format, your readers can see what a list is about without wasting time. If it’s what they want to learn more about, they’ll dive in and read it.

Apply Other Formatting…but Sparingly!

There are other, more basic formatting features you can apply to text. Want some basic information to stand out? Use bold formatting (as I did in the bulleted list above). Introducing a new word or phrase? Italicize it. Got a quote to share? Here’s what I say:

If it’s longer than a dozen or so words, consider putting quotations between <blockquote> and </blockquote> tags. This clearly identifies the text as a quote from another author. (Well, in this case, it’s still words of wisdom from me, but you can quote me if you like.)

Don’t use ALL CAPS. It’s childish and unprofessional and considered by many to be “shouting.” And don’t use underlines. On the Web, underlines indicate hyperlinks and you can confuse your readers.

And don’t use too much formatting. There comes a point when the repeated application of bold and/or italic formatting loses meaning and simply fails to do the intended job.

Insert Illustrations

I’m a firm believer in the old adage: “One picture is worth a thousand words.” Maybe that’s why I’ve been writing Visual QuickStart Guides for Peachpit Press since 1995. Those books are full of screenshots — mine average 3-4 per page — and are excellent tools for teaching readers how to perform tasks with various software.

In regular writing — such as the writing you might do for your blog — images can also help communicate information. Did you write a software how-to piece? Screenshots of the steps would be extremely helpful. Did you write about a recent vacation? Include a few photos to show the scenes you’ve written about. Does your article explain the organization of a company or one of its departments? Include an organizational chart to put things in perspective.

On the Web, images do more than just communicate information. They also add visual appeal. Think about it as you visit sites on the Web. Which pages or blog posts caught your attention more? The ones without images? Or the ones with photos or drawings?

If you don’t have illustrations for your article and you want to include some other kind of graphic element, try text in a box. This effect, which is often used in print publications, can add visual appeal almost as much as an image can.

Let’s face it: people like to look at pictures. By giving them pictures that relate to your article, you can capture their attention and reel them in to read more about what the picture shows.

A word of warning here: Don’t use photos that don’t belong to you — doing so is likely a violation of copyright law. You can probably use company logos — if your use is consistent with the company’s rules governing logo use (normally available on its Web site) and you’re writing about the company. But taking photos off another Web site or scanning them out of a print publication for use on your site could get you in a lot of trouble. It’s stealing, plain and simple, and you could get sued. Use photos, screenshots, and drawings that you’ve taken or that you’ve received permission to use. The rule of thumb here is, if you don’t know whether you have permission to use it, you probably don’t.

Conclusion

As you can see, each of these techniques is relatively easy to implement on your blog. While it isn’t necessary to use all of them in one article (as I’ve attempted to do here), you can mix and match them as you see fit to liven up the layout and appearance of your prose.

The main thing to remember is this: the more interesting you make your text appear at first glance, the more likely you are to get readers to stick around and read what you’ve written.

Oh, and by the way, just about everything in this article also applies to your non-Web writing efforts: reports, articles, white papers, and books. You just won’t need HTML code to get the job done.

Three Types of Blog Entries

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And how they can make your blog succeed.

Every blogger has his own style of blogging which combines writing style, voice, and entry type. While writing style and voice are primarily dependent on the blogger and his writing skills, entry type is something that can be easily changed.

The way I see it, there are several different types of blog entries. Each type has its own pros and cons. In this article, I want to take a closer look at the three types I use and explain why I think they’re useful.

Daily or Weekly Link Lists

If you maintain a blog, you probably also read other blogs and visit Web sites. Along the way, you might find articles you want to share with your blog’s readers. That’s what link list entries are all about. They offer a quick list of links to articles and blog entries on the Web with or without brief comments.

Pros

The benefit of this type of entry is that it’s quick and easy to create. It offers value to readers in that it tells them about Web-based content that they might find useful or interesting. But it doesn’t usually add much in the way of content. Sure, your comments can explain what the link is all about, but they’re not usually a major part of the entry. The links themselves are the content.

Cons

The drawback of this type of entry is that there simply isn’t much “meat” in it. Your list of links might not provide anything new for folks who spend much of their time on the Web — as many blog readers do. Links you find today may have been found by others who listed them yesterday or last week or last year. I’ve often read link lists and found links I’m already familiar with — and that’s saying a lot because I don’t spend a lot of time on the Web. Still, to many blog visitors, old news is better than no news. If you’re one of the few sources of links for some of your visitors, they’re likely to find a lot of value in the links you share.

Note

A side note here: I create my daily link list as I visit Web sites and blogs by using the Daily Blog Posting feature of Del.icio.us and a Del.icio.us bookmarklet. This system is extremely easy to use, although formatting is preset and limited. As I find interesting sites, articles, or pages, I use the bookmarklet to add them to my Del.icio.us Bookmarks. At the end of the day, the Daily Blog Posting feature automatically compiles all the bookmarks I added that day and turns them into a links list and posts it to my WordPress-based blog. The result is the Links posts you can find in the This just in… topic on my site. Oddly enough, this is the only reason I use Del.icio.us. (I maintain my bookmarks list in Firefox, synchronized automatically on all my computers using Foxmark Bookmark Syncrhonizer.) You can access this Del.icio.us feature for yourself. Log into your Del.icio.us account and, from your settings page, click Daily Blog Posting. You can find instructions for using this feature in “How to back up del.icio.us bookmarks on your blog” and elsewhere on the Web.

Analysis of Web Content

From the very beginning, blogs have included analysis or commentary about other content on the Web. A Web site or another blog would publish an article about something — anything! — and a blogger would quote it, link to it, and write up some commentary. There’s still a huge amount of that going on today — in fact, I’d bet that 80% or more of blog entries fall into this type of entry.

This is, in effect, one step beyond a simple link with a summary sentence or two. An entry like this includes a link to and quote from someone else’s original material, but analyzes it and offers the blogger’s take on it. Fox News does an article on President Bush’s most recent speech and a blogger picks out a choice quote or two and tear it to shreds. (Or, as the case may be, praises the reporter for his insightful commentary.) Microsoft issues a press release about the latest Windows security problem and fix and a blogger quotes a summary paragraph and explains how the problem may or may not affect most users. People magazine does a story about celebrities adopting African orphans and a blogger quotes the piece and explains why she thinks they should be adopting American orphans. Or, in a recent example from my site, I discover an online Internet connection speed testing utility, link to it and quote the introduction for its use, and explain why I think it’s a good tool. Get the idea?

When you create entries like this, there’s a certain amount of value added: your commentary. The value, of course, depends on your expertise (do you know what you’re talking about?), your thoughts about the topic (are your thoughts positive, negative, or critically useful in any way?), and your writing skills (can you communicate your thoughts in a way that’s clear, concise, or at least entertaining?). The goal is to consistently create entries that your audience finds interesting. But be warned! If you disappoint your audience one too many times, they won’t keep checking in for the latest.

Pros

The main benefit of this kind of entry is that it’s relatively quick and easy to create. Can be timely (if based on current events) or long-lasting (if based on information that’s useful for a good, long while). The commentary helps readers make conclusions based on an “expert” opinion, so it’s valuable to them and they’ll come back for more.

Cons

There’s a lot of this stuff out there. If your commentary is the same old thing that can be found on other blogs, there may be no reason for visitors to come to your blog. It’s hard to set your blog apart from the others with this type of entry unless your good at it and your commentary is worth reading. And timely content has a limited “shelf life,” thus requiring that you constantly add new content — several entries a day! — to keep readers coming back for more.

Full-length Articles

Full-length articles are just that: original articles that cover a specific topic. Although they may quote and reference other Web sources, most of the information and conclusions are yours. These are the articles that most readers are looking for. When you link to and/or quote other writers’ original articles on your site, all you’re doing is sending readers to those sites or blogs. But when you create original material on your blog, other bloggers will send readers to you. And that’s the goal, isn’t it?

Full-length articles are what can set your blog apart from others. These articles represent your thoughts and ideas, your opinions and viewpoints. They can provide instructions for completing tasks (as many of my articles do here for various computer software programs), provide news and opinion about current events locally or worldwide, or tell a story about the weird thing that happened to you on your last day off. A full-length article can be all original material or can combine bits and pieces of other material, drawn together solely to provide background information or strengthen your viewpoint. (One of my favorite opinion pieces is by John Aabbott, who occasionally writes for wickenburg-az.com; in “Just Say No to Wal-Mart in Wickenburg“, he argues about why Wickenburg should not have a Wal-Mart, using lots of quotes and online references to make his point.)

Pros

The full-length articles you write can only be found in one place: on your blog. If you write something useful and/or interesting, other bloggers may send readers to your blog, helping to increase your blog’s readership. Articles can help establish you as knowledgeable about a topic — perhaps even an expert.

Cons

Not everyone is cut out to write full-length articles of value to readers. You need a well thought-out topic, the ability to organize your thoughts, writing skills, and, most of all, time. (I don’t know anyone who can knock off a 1500-word article in 30 minutes.) Your topic must appeal to your blog’s readers — or the readers you want to attract. Sure, you might be able to write 2,000 words about that weird thing that happened to you on your last day off from work, but do people really want to read it? Do they care? There’s a lot of dull stuff out there (and I’ll admit, in this blog, too) that simply won’t get read.

Developing a Strategy

It’s up to you to develop a strategy for your blog. My advice is to mix these three types of blog entries as time allows. That’s what I do and I’ve had relatively good success.

If you have a good technique for creating link lists, you should add links to your list each time you visit other sites/blogs and find content of interest to your readers. This is quick and easy to to do and has some value to your site’s visitors.

When time allows, take the links the next step by including some useful commentary about the sites or articles you link to. This makes your entries more valuable to readers.

If you can consistently come up with informative and interesting full-length articles for your blog, by all means, write them! If your blogging software supports scheduled entries, you might want to use a trick I use: write several articles in a day — or a long article broken down into logical segments — and schedule them to be published over several days or weeks. This ensures a steady stream of good, fresh content for readers rather than bunching articles up on the days you have time to write them. Multi-part articles also give readers a reason to come back for more.

Of course, your strategy will depend on your blog and your blogging style. What works best for you? Use the comments link to share your thoughts with the rest of us.

Useful HTML Tricks for Bloggers

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Formatting can help draw readers in and keep them reading.

Amit Agarwal has written a nice little article that provides a few quick and easy-to-use HTML coding tricks that you can use in your blog posts to make them more visually appealing. After all, no one wants to big, fat, unbroken paragraphs of text.

From Useful HTML Tricks for Bloggers on :

Though knowledge of HTML or CSS is not essential to writing a blog, it is always nice to have some basic idea of these languages to make your blog posts stand-out – after all, readers have such short attention spans and we, as bloggers, desperately want them to read our content.

This is the new HTML thing I learned today. I can now put text in a box and have text wrap around it. It’ll be a nice effect for making points in an article.

My favorite tip? Putting text in a box and having other text wrap around it.

Although I’m no stranger to HTML and CSS, I’m no expert, either. I learn from getting the basics in articles like this one, then experimenting on my own to fine-tune the effect. For example, Amit’s article displays a fixed width/height box with borders on top and bottom only. My box here is a true box (borders on all sides) that’s just tall enough to fit the text I want to put into it.

I’ll have to do an article about this effect in the future. Stay tuned.

Six Improvements For Your Blog

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From lifehack.org

Interested in a few basic blog improvements? Chris Brogan’s article should give you some ideas.

From Six Improvements to Your Blog on lifehack.org:

I’ve done a lot of blog surfing lately, in search of new (best) blogs. What I found often, however, was that there are things people could do to improve the relationship and interaction value of their blogs, which would in turn build a better bridge between blogs and their readers.

Chris’s six tips are extremely basic, with advice that includes formatting posts to make them more legible and making it easy for readers to contact you. I don’t agree with everything said — for example, the contact advice doesn’t work for me and I don’t see anything wrong with captchas if they prevent comment spam — but it’s a good look at some things you may be able to do to improve your blog overall.

Does anyone have any other tips they might want to share with readers? Use the Comments link here.