Dave’s Ramblings

Public service announcement for bloggers, it’s come to my attention that even though I may be one of the geekiest folks around, I just have to have the most toys, gadgets, websites, computers, servers, you name it and yet until about a month ago I had no idea what on earth a trackbacks and pings from a blog were actually for, nor was a really running any blogs of my own for some reason or another.

Allowing comments on your blog can be a great thing, but the ‘comment spam’ is getting crazy, i for one certainly don;t want my blogs filled with crud from online casino, pharms or other crap like that, for one I don’t want to see it, and two; links to ‘bad neighborhoods’ such as those never do you any good if you are using your blog for website or keyword promotion. So if you use them, be smart about it and turn on the moderation controls were you have to specifically approve or disapprove a comment, yes the extra few minutes wasted could be spent elsewhere, but now at least you know when you’ve received a new comment, and not get hammered by these silly little spam bots running amok.

Back to the topic at hand, it comes to mind that many others who have been blogging for a long time don’t have a clue what a trackback or ping from a blog is for, how to use them, or why they should use them. So here’s your explanation;

“Trackback” is a feature that provides an automated process to alert another bloger that you have mentioned a post or their blog in yours, it also provides for a link to the other blog, thus creating a mini-community of sorts. It also adds content for their blog and a link back to yours. A good tool for gaining backlinks (take a look under my fledgeling Webmaster/SEO Tools category, small but nothing but quality tools and links to quality info there).

A Ping, first that is what is sent to another blog you just linked a trackback to (tells their blog you trackbacked them (the software will generally come back to your blog and grab a copy or excerpt of your entry and post it as a comment on that blog). It can also serve other purposes, I know WordPress has it as a standard feature, I would guess others do as well, anytime a comment or blog entry is made the blog software will Ping whatever services you tell it to that your blog has been updated, they in turn will generally come back and grab your syndication feed and add it to their list of recent posts on their service or subscription page.

At least for WordPress blogs, if you click the Title of the entry, that will give you a link to the tackback URL/URI, clicking on comment will do the same thing for WP and most others out there.

Pretty simple really, wether you are looking for more readers, better search engine page results, or just more content, try it, instead of commenting on this entry, use your blog to post the comment and set the backtrack to this article, any magically you will add content to both of our blogs.

In my opinion blogs with so much activity or wild color schemes detract from the overall appeal of a blog. I prefer simple layouts, with easy to read and thus follow entries and comments. Entries tend to be in very disconnected series as it is (one of the things that make them interesting to read), whatever you decide upon the apply the KISS principle for your readership and they will not only return, but you may find they will plow through your archives as well.

Just my nickel’s worth from a new blogger. Kinda of like using trackbacks to comment to posts instead of just leaving a comment, it helps build connections from various communities, again adding to the fun factor as you never know just where you will end up.

Just discoved today that Wordpress finally released version 1.5 as stable. I’ve been testing the daily snapshots for a couple of weeks and like the new layout for administration and the simplistic new ways to add/change the templates/themes ‘on the fly’ with no hassle.

For those getting ready to take the jump up here are some links for the themes I’ve located thus far for version 1.5.

Several located at WPTheme Info including the Shadedgrey that I’m using now.
For the simplestic or neat freaks take a look at Way too Clean
Kiss in the Dark has a few as well.

I’m sure there are many more sites that I have overlooked, and many new themes will be converted to the 1.5 format and many new ones will appear on the horizon. I’ll continue to add to this list as I can find them. In the iterim, happy blogging.

Found something interesting for promoting your blog without any hassle Ping-O-Matic. It’ll get your blog indexed and seen by a dozen or so blog directories without any hassle. Been using it maually for the last week or so, and now I’m starting to see a number of backlinks appearing across MSN and Yahoo from the directories and a few other odd sites (apparently some folks are reading my ramblings for some reason or another), Google only updates BL’s about monthly so in a few weeks we’ll see what the big G thinks. Though I don’t think anything beats manual submissions to gain BL’s, at least the sites supported by PingOMatic add takes care of a dozen or so for you. Adding a link to here in the footer for all pages in our Coral Reef Forum sure didn’t hurt anything, the bots have been cruising through almost daily. Think I’m actually starting to get some of this SEO stuff sorted out, Dave’s Ramblings now ranks #5 in Google by title, not bad out of about 53K, it was ranked at 500+ two weeks ago.

Next trick will be to try get a cron job to call wget or something to submit the site to P-o-M to ping all the directories for me.

If you have not seen it yet, there is a new hack for phpBB out in Beta test, the Blog Mod, now up to v0.2.0, it’s working so well I’ve moved into production so all of my forum members can now have a blog of their own, mostly to keep track of their saltwater reef tanks and things along that line, provides them with a great record keeping service, but also adds a bunch pages to the allinurl of the site, search engines are chewing through them like crazy! Very feature rich , the only issue I have with it thus far is that by default it is so customizable that it may be daunting for some users and they may be getting lost in the options, that would explain why most are using the default layout. Oh wait I still fit in that category for WordPress, one of these days I’ll make this a bit more presentable.

I’ve added a couple of new templates to the Mod, so we’ll see as time goes by what everyone thinks. If you’d like to see it in action, here is the listing of publically viewable blogs, and my personal Reef Journal can be viewed as well…

Harnessing the popularity of Blogs in general and tie them to Google tearing through them, this can only give things a boost.