Wordpress Tip: Trackback and Pingback
Back in primary and secondary school our teachers worked hard to teach us that it is not nice to copy someone else’s work without giving proper credit. In other words, don’t plagiarize! In university we learned that we had to include citations to the work we quoted from.
So now that your blogging, there is a similar term for giving reference to someone else’s work, trackback and pingback or simply pinging. Basically both are a way of saying, “Here is my citation and works cited for this post.” The difference between the two? Trackback is the manual way and Pinging is Automatic.
So how do you use trackback and pingback in Wordpress 2 ?
Wordpress Permalinks: a quick study
First of all…what are permalinks?
If you click on the title of a post, you will notice that the post opens up in it’s own page. If you look in the address bar of your browser that is the permalink. That is what someone would use in their page to link to that particular post.
Wordpress has a good explanation here:
I found this site off of the Wordpress page about permalinks:
Now my understanding is that with Wordpress 2.0+ you do NOT have to manually create a .htaccess file that Wordpress will handle all that for you! So all you have to do now is pick a permalink format and STICK WITH IT!!! Sticking with a format is important once your site has been submitted to Google because Google will “index” your page (more on that later). Changing the permalink structure theoretically can cause problems for people who have linked to your page / post.
I have a software blog at (http://globalmapperforum.com) You will notice that I am using the default permalinks there. That was not intentional but I am really glad because it worked out well that way. That site also runs a vbulletin forum and I was very glad when creating the custom vbulletin template that I had very short URLs to link to from the forum back to the blog. I have not noticed any affect in my page rank on this site because of the default permalinks, in fact, it has done quite well on the ranking for it’s keywords.
The key is this…pick one structure you like and keep it.
I have chosen to use:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
for this site. We’ll see how it work.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Blogging Tools I can’t live without
I am currently working on 1, 2, 3…ok, about 10 blogs. That is A LOT of writing and editing. I am all about efficiency (see http://greenfindit.com) anyhow…here are some Blogging tools to increase my productivity:
(BTW the idea for this post is originally from: http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/post/top-10-tools-i-cant-live-without/)
1) Firefox - I can’t imagine my life without it, it is as simple as that.
2) Scribefire - Cool! When you are working on a lot of blog, this is your tool. You can add all your blogs and make posts from within Firefox. You can save notes, edit pages…everything.
3) SnagIT - a screen capture program from Techsmith. It also has a very easy-to-use image editor. I have been using this for years. They just released some new extensions that allow me to publish from SnagIt to a blog. That’s cool.
4) Photoshop - the gold standard in image editing. Sometimes it is overkill but if you have to do it right…do it with Photoshop. There are a lot of CSS themes I have edited that would have been a real pain in the backside without this program
5) Wordpress - I can’t say I have used every Blogging platform out there but of the ones I have used, Wordpress is by far my favorite. Why? One word…plugins.
6) EditPad Lite - This is a notepad replacement. I have used the Pro version and the lite version (free). I can say that the lite version has everything I need. I have also used Notepad++ (open source) for some reason I keep going back to Editpad.
7) Globalscape CuteFTP 7 home - This is my FTP program. I must have found this years ago and bought a copy. I haven’t upgraded either, I am just very happy with it and it works great. It has everything I need.
Microsoft Expression Web - I found this program recently and really like it. I really like the CSS editor. It is very intuitive.
9) AI Roboform - I have hundreds of passwords and there is no humanly way to keep them straight (or secure) I use Roboform to do it for me. I even have Portable Roboform installed on my iPod so I can plug it in to my laptop and have my passwords handy on the road.
Welcome to Wordpress Find It
Hello and welcome to Wordpress Find It!
This site was started as a result of my learning experiences with Wordpress. As of this writing, I have now set up and customized close to 15 Wordpress sites and have learned a lot along the way. I thought to myself, “I should start a site just about these learning pains!” Maybe you’ll benefit from my mistakes and we can learn together.
I hope that this site will grow to a place where you can share your experiences with me as well
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