Ignore this message.
Don’t mind me. I’m just playing with the trackback feature of WordPress to figure out how to use it properly. The linked article appears on another one of my WordPress sites, wickenburg-az.com. It’s an article I wrote a few years ago about the museum in Wickenburg.
The Desert Caballeros Western Museum is One of Wickenburg’s Treasures
I start to tap into the power of WordPress for Web publishing.
WordPress is an Open Source blogging tool. At least that’s how it’s promoted. But it’s so much more than that.
WordPress is a highly customizable Web publishing platform. With WordPress, a server, and a little ingenuity, you can build a Web site with nicely formatted static and dynamic pages. New content can be added by anyone you give access to. Site visitors can add comments — if you allow them to. Best of all, because it’s based on a blog engine, blogging features apply: date-based content display, automatic archiving of content, support for pinging and trackbacks — the list goes on and on.
I started getting a real feel for WordPress when I started rebuilding wickenburg-az.com, a Web site I have been maintaining since 1999 to provide information about the town I live in, Wickenburg, AZ. I started off keeping it simple, choosing a nice looking theme called Connections by Patricia Muller to control the appearance of the site. I immediately started tweaking the theme, changing the link colors and the header image. Then, after I had some content added, I continued tweaking by adding more features: automatic article author images, Webcams, random list of articles on topics pages, random header images, site statistics, weather, donation button, calendar of upcoming events, and Technorati tags. I added some “under the hood” features, too: comment spam protection, automated database backup, and sticky posts (which can glue a post to the top of the Home page until I release it). Right now, I’m trying to add the Users Online feature I have on this site, but I’m running into a page formatting problem and still need to work out the details to get it to work.
Every change I make to the site teaches me something about the way WordPress works. I learn more about HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL, and Apache every day. For years, I’ve avoided digging deeply into advance Web publishing coding because I knew so little about it. Now I’m forcing myself to learn by working with it daily. I love the challenge. And I love applying the things I learned yesterday to the things I do tomorrow.
I’ll be writing more about WordPress in the weeks to come, so if you’re a WordPress user or are just curious about it, I hope you’ll keep checking in. Together, we’ll learn more about this great Web publishing tool.
I get my first spam comment on this site.
One of the features of WordPress is the ability to collect comments on each and every post. The idea here is to foster a sort of community with feedback and additional comments to enhance the original post. I’m looking forward the comments I get on wickenburg-az.com and have already gotten quite a few. I don’t expect to get too many here because no matter how radical the ideas I express are, few people are brave enough to step forward and comment about them. There’s that and the fear that the e-mail address they’re required to enter may be used for spam.
It won’t. I have better things to do with my time than fill other people’s mailbox with junk mail. Heck, I have enough of a time keeping the junk out of mine.
Anyway, comments are commonly used by spammers to insert advertisements and links for something that has little or nothing to do with the post they’re spamming. That’s why I have WordPress set up to require that I review every comment before approving it.
This morning, there was a spam message in there from some kind of online casino. I knew it was spam without clicking the link and I immediately disposed of it. It’s quick and easy: two button clicks and it’s gone.
If spam becomes a problem, there’s a plugin I can install that will prevent it from being automatically entered. The software requires the commenter to enter a code that appears in a graphic onscreen before the comment can be entered. You’ve probably seen things like that on other Web sites; it’s getting more and more common these days. It’s an extra step for the commenter and I’d prefer not to institute it, but I will if I have to.
I think that if we all just ignored all spam and stopped clicking those links they include, spam might go away. But then again, I’m often quite naive about things like this, so I’m probably wrong.
Anyway, please don’t think that I’ll delete a comment that argues a post it’s commenting on. I won’t — unless it’s abusive or libelous. I believe in free speech and this blog is my outlet for exercising mine. You can use it to exercise yours, too. Just don’t get nasty about it, okay?