Everybody knows what a blog comment is and what is it used for, but lately we hear more and more about the term ‘pingback’. In WordPress talk, the pingback (not to be confused with an ICMP ping) is a method used to notify us when someone links to us from their own blog.

For instance, I’m writing this post on my blog right now (blog A). Someone might find it useful and mention it in his blog (blog B). When he publishes his post, his WordPress scripts send a xmlrpc request to my blog. My blog then verifies the existance of the link in the post and if it’s there it automatically posts the pingback onsite as sucessful.

Ok, it’s time for some action again.

The next few weeks we’ll be releasing a series of tutorials on how to design and code a WordPress Theme. If you missed our first tutorial, it’s located here.

We’ll cover topics like:

• how to design/draw a WordPress theme
• how to slice the final image and export it to html
• how to create the css stylesheet ready for use with WordPress
• how to ‘code’ the theme
• the wordpress header
• the wordpress footer
• how to create the index page
• how to create posts pages
• comments pages
• and so on

The tutorials may include videos(or pdfs) or not, it depends on you. If you feel you’re interested in this tutorial series, then get our RSS to be notified when a new post is made or bookmark this page. Here we’ll post the links to each topic and updates.

Also, feel free to ask any questions or make any suggestions.

I’ll be providing a demo premium wordpress theme with options in the admin area ( this will be for advanced users only though : )  ).

Keep in touch,

- Peter

I know everybody is waiting for it. I opened their official website this morning and I saw some good news and some bad news. Good news is they’re working on it and there isn’t much to wait, bad news is that the original release date was 10th of November and they’re currently testing the beta 2.

To be honest, I didn’t see many improvements, I was expecting something really ‘wow’. When I installed the beta 1, the first thing that I noticed was the new admin area. So far so good. Now it’s easier to navigate in the admin panel and it has a better dashboard as well.

If you’re interested in the new features, you can go here. I enjoyed the XMLRPC comments posting and the core updating. Good job with these!

Anyway, go and test it and let me know your thoughts.

- Peter

It’s obvious that the tell a friend scripts become more and more popular each day. So why not giving it a change?

First, what is tell a friend?

The whole idea behind this is very simple: your visitors can email their friends telling them to come and check what you got, no matter if your website is a dating one, or a social network, or a blog. Yes, tell a friend scripts can be applied to blogs as well.

Why is tell a friend important for you?

Simply because this way your website can go viral (self promoting). Imagine if someone lands on your website and uses the tell a friend script to get 10 people on your website. That’s 10 more free visitors for you. Now, what if those 10 emailed by the first visitor will email 10 friends each, this way? You’ll get 100 visitors. And it could go on and on and on.

Where do I get a tell a friend script from?

Hmm … I’ll let you do the research and testing. I installed few of them on some of my clients websites and they were pretty happy. However, recently, I ended up building a little free tool that places a tweetme button on every single post of yours. You can get it from here: tweet-me button for wordpress. If you don’t own a wordpress blog, but still want to have that button on, there is an equivalent for the other platforms, free as well and you can get it from here: tweet-me button for other platforms. Feel free to use both of them and let me know if you encounter any problems.

How do I install a tell a friend script once I got it?

Well… Most of them come with an install guide at least, or even free installation.  If you need more info on how to integrate it into your blog once you got it, just reply to this post or contact me.

I won’t stay on this subject too much, I just mentioned it as it can bring you some extra traffic and extra cheese if used properly.

Hope this helps,

Peter

As I was promissing few days ago here, I’ll name few tools that you can use to fight agains Wordpress Spam.

Here we go:

1. Akismet - a very popular plugin which comes by default with wordpress. To use it, you need to signup for a wordpress acount and get an API key for your website.
2. Defensio - A wordpress plugin that helps you filter your comments and also provides rss feed for both accepted and ’spammed’ comments.
3. Simple CAPTCHA - Adds turing text to your comment area to eliminate automated comments
4. Challenge - Adds a challenge to your comments area, the regular stuff being additions and multiplications
5. Referrer Bouncer - You don’t need to do anything to use it. Just activate it.
6. Email Immunizer - Simply converts all your emails on your website to numeric references to prevent email colecting
7. WPBayes - Implements the spam filtering with the Naive Bayesian technique, which means it marks the comments as spam or not based on your previous decisions. To be honest, I didn’t use this one
8. Spam Karma 2 - This one assigns a karma score based on multiple factors like the age of the post, the email, if there’s a link inside, etc, etc.
9. WP Spam Hitman - It fights agains wordpress spam using a series of patterns. That’s all I know about it, please test it and let me know if it’s a good one.
10. Did you pass Math - Does the same thing as the one at point #4.

Well.. I think 10 tools are enough to keep you away from spam comments. Test them and use the one(s) you like the most.

- Peter

Spam is a huge problem these days, and not only for email accounts. It’s done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to public services. Blogs can be spammed too. In fact, everything that requires posting and user action/comments can be spammed (forums, boards, blogs, guestbooks, wikis, etc). Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks can be a target for spammers. WordPress spam is done using the commenting feature of wordpress, therefore the term “comments spam”. By posting links, spammers help increasing the pagerank of a website and the traffic coming from refering websites as well.

A variety of anchors are used by spammers: images, regular link text and even whole paragraphs.

The smiley WordPress spam techinique

WordPress spam usually comes in this format: “nice post, thanks” and a link at the end of the post with a smiley ( :) ) as the anchor. Many wordpress owners won’t notice the comment has a link because it’s hidden by that smiley, as wordpress parses the smiley text into an image. The html looks like this:

"Nice post, thanks <a href="http://spamdomain.com"> : ) </a>

It’s quite easy to spot it. Everytime someone posts a comment on my blog I’m getting an email with a notice (I don’t remember if that’s default, but there’s an option for it in the settings menu, just look for it and you’ll find it). Since my email is powered by yahoo, I see the html because yahoo transforms it into regular text (for the same purposes, html is not allowed if not properly set) and I can see it’s spam.

Another clue would be the comments admin area of WordPress. Depending on your blogs css version and settings, links are underlined (I assume this is happening for most WordPress versions). Therefore, you can check for smileys in the comment before you approve it and see if they point to some external link.

How to block WordPress Spam

Fortunately, protection against wordpress spam is available. There are many ways to fight against it and, depending on your imagination, you can come up with more.

1. Disallowing multiple consecutive submissions - You won’t see too often users to reply to their own posts. Well … spammers will do it. So a possible solution would be to check if the current user IP is not the same with the last one and if a specific time period has passed. However, this can block multiple users behind the same proxy and using the same public IP. It’s up to you if you use this or not
2. Keyword blocking - this can be one of the most effective ways to block wordpress spam. You will eliminate spam simply by banning names of popular pharmaceuticals or casino games etc. for instance, “viagra”.
3. Nofollow - it’s added by default in the newer WordPress distributions. When a search engine finds the nofollow tag applied to a hyperlink, it breaks the process, so even if you link to some external URLs, they won’t be considered as links by the search engines. Google announced in 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link’s target ranking in the search engines index. Yahoo and MSN also respect this tag.
4. Validation (CAPTCHA) - a method used to detect robots. Before a form is validated, a random text verification is required to the end-user.
5. Disallowing links in posts - simply, would cut any link posted in a comment by the user or simply transform it into regular text.
6. Redirects - instead of displaying the direct link to the actual target, it would display a link to a script on the same server that redirects to the correct URL.

These are few ways to protect your blog against WordPress Spam. In case I missed something, you can post a comment and tell me (make sure you don’t include any link, lol =) ). In a future post I’ll name few plugins that would help you fight against WordPress spam.

- Peter

One cool thing you can do with WordPress these days is let your visitors choose the theme they want to see on your website (of course, if you have many of them installed).

What is a Theme Chooser For Wordpress?

It’s an addon for WordPress that makes it possible for your visitors to change the layout they want to see with just a click of a mouse. Yep, that’s possible and very easy to implement. First, you need to have multiple themes installed on your WordPress blog. Where to find them? It’s simple: google will give you all the answers you need. Just do a search for “free wordpress theme” or other related terms, and you’ll find a dozen of free themes to add to your blog. The next step is to upload them. Once you have them on your computer, unzip and use your ftp client to upload them and last, activate them from your admin area.

The next step is to ‘install a WordPress theme chooser add-on‘. By default, WordPress offers you the possibility to upload as many themes as you want, but use only one at a time. However, you can change that. How? With an addon. You have two options for this task.

The first one is “theme preview“. This one will allow your visitors to choose from a list of themes and preview them in the browser. Although there is a single theme activated as the main one and all the visitors will see it when they land on your blog for the first time, they will be able to switch to another one very easy. You don’t even need to install the themes. To install this plugin, just download it from the wordpress plugins website, unzip, upload to your server and activate it from the “plugins” menu in the admin area, then access your blog with an URL in this format: www.yourblogdomainname.com/index.php?preview_theme=some_theme (of course, change “some_theme” with your theme name). That’s it, test it and let me know if it works … or not :)

The second option is “Theme switcher“. This plugin does the same as the first one. To install it, just upload it to your plugins folder and then activate it from your admin area then add your themes as they say on the instructions page (you can find it in the settings menu). They offer 2 formats: full list or dropdown.

To conclude, if you want to let your visitors view your blog the way they want, you have at least 2 possibilities to do that, so you can’t say it’s impossible, even if your tech skills keep you far away from beeing an expert in this area. The theme chooser for WordPress makes it possible.

Hope this helps,

- Peter