A certain Al McCaw aka Al Sembrano contracted some work to be done on the website of the book 10 Sikreto ng mga Mayayaman. And ArenaWP Wordpress theme competition winner Gail Dela Cruz was assigned to do the job. The client demanded a full refund for the web design of the site. And now the site ends up to be using the design and just modifying it a little bit. Sounds like a rip-off, but let you decide. Details can be found on her wordpress blog, Kutitots.
Isulong SEOph

A couple of weeks ago, I was so excited to see that I had a lot of ‘comments’ for moderation only to find out that they’re all spam - all 43 of them! I then thought, how could comment spam go through if I have the captcha plugin installed? At first, I thought the spammers were deliberately typing in their spam into my blog but when I checked, all the ‘comments’ were actually trackback spam! Now I know how it got through captcha. For those who don’t know, captcha is a wordpress comment plugin that adds a set of characters to type in a small graphic before someone can post a comment.

On the other hand, trackbacks are ‘comments’ that are automatically posted when someone links to your site and ‘pings’ your site. Trackbacks are highly automated and therefore should not pass through captcha. So what spammers do is exploit this loophole to post their spams on people’s blogs hoping that they will be approved OR be automatically approved by the system if moderation of comments is disabled. In my case, comment moderation was turned on so I was able to catch the problem before they were posted on my site.

My next step now was to look for a solution. My first logical solution was to enter common spam words in the Wordpress admin under Options->Discussion. So I went to copy a list of common spam words from the wordpress website and pasted them in the proper place under Options->Discussion. I then waited for a 3 days and to my amazement, trackback spam went down from 10 per day to only 1 per week! Not bad huh? I then tried turning off the captcha plugin to see if it spam goes up but it still stayed at one per week. So I turned off captcha and decided to give it a few more months. So far, comment spam is still down to 1 per week and I find that tolerable enough. So I conclude that this solves my Trackback spam problem. I’ve also included my ‘moderation settings’ in my website for those who want to try my setup in fighting trackback spam.

I heard that the Akismet plugin works better than my method so you can give it a try. The Akismet plugin is already included by default in your wordpress installation. You just need to enable it.

Enjoy!

If you haven’t read the previous post, Gail Dela Cruz was one of the recent winners in the Wordpress Theme Competition by ArenaWP. Gail is a self-taugh web designer, a dog lover and will be getting married soon! (Not to dogs of course) Read on for more details…
P_WP: Hello Gail, thanks for giving us the time to spare for this interview. You have been in the Philippine blog circles and have heard you during the first iBlog summit. You were a finalist at last years Philippine Web Awards, so how did your web life all start? Can you give us a brief history? (Pwede din long history if you want. hehe)

Gail: Hmm… It’s kind of a long story… About 10 years worth of stories, in fact.

My parents are both artists, my dad a photojournalist for the Inquirer, and my mom a painter (just a hobbyist). Even my sister was great with a pencil and a sketchpad. But me, I could only draw cartoons, nothing fancy. When we first got internet back in 1996 (I was in my second year in high school), that’s when I fell in love with web/graphics design. I went through the mIRC stage, but got bored with it eventually when I decided one day that I wanted to build my own site and make graphics like those I visit. So I got me a Photoshop 4 installer (a birthday present from my dad), and played around with it. When I knew how to create my own graphics, that’s when I started viewing HTML source codes (I learned the hard way: deconstruction). There weren’t much tutorials about HTML back then, so I didn’t have much choice.

So then I made sites for my high school class, myself, my dad, and other relatives and friends. In college, I stopped web for a while when I got into Ateneo’s school paper and became the Graphic Design Editor for two years. I did some freelance print stints for some time (you know, digital album layouts for my dad’s photographer friends), and even worked for a call center as tech support after college. I haven’t even reached regularization (I was only there for about 6 months) until I got bored answering the same computer questions every single day. That’s when I went back to web.

Took me about a month to get myself familiarized with the trends again, then I launched Kutitots. After a couple of months of very little web design gigs (I had to rely on my dad’s contacts for some time), I got lucky and had a client who sent a regular flow of work to me. I think my first big break on the blogging community was getting the Blog Site of the Year Award for the 2004 Philippine Blog Awards (which is now defunct, unfortunately). So there. Told you it was long

P_WP: Nice history, I can totally relate to that, starting out from nothing with no ‘real’ formal training. Are you an artist with technical skills? Or technical person with artistic skills? Obviously, you do know your flash very well, how are you with the backend stuff, like PHP/MySQL?

Gail: Definitely an artist with technical skills. I can’t program an app or create a custom module even if my life depended on it.

I’m really not a coder… so let’s just say I know enough to skin it, change it a bit, and manipulate it enough to create themes of my liking But start from scratch and create custom modules? Nope. Not in this lifetime.

P_WP: What actually is Kutitots? Reminds me of Kalikot and Kiti-kiti.

Gail: Well, I’ve searched the net and it actually means some kind of a pepper in a Visayan dialect. But the way I came up with the name was less exciting than that… And I can’t explain any other way without sounding girly.

My family and I (and now includes my fiance) like inventing words out of real ones. Kind of like “baby talk” or something affectionate. “Kutitots” is our plural for “Kutitot,” which happens to be my family’s cutesy term for kuto. Yes. flea. As in, fleas in a dog that suck blood and become as big as a raisin when fed well. Anyway, I picked Kutitots for my site’s name for the simple reason that I love dogs, and they have fleas. It’s ok for one dog in the house to have a little bit of fleas. But if you’re talking about more than 10 (13, to be exact), peeing, scratching, and running all over the house, it’s an entirely different story altogether.

I think you’ll now understand why I still cringe a bit when somebody calls me “Kutitots” instead of “Gail.”

P_WP: I will take note of that and make sure I always call you Gail. Now for the Wordpress stuff, I have seen your flash site before and now it is a Wordpress blog. Why and when did you decide to change? Is the flash site still up there somewhere in some archived page on the net by the way?

Gail: Updating drove me nuts It was just too difficult to maintain… And frankly, I got a bit bored with it because Marc is better than in animation hehe. The old version is actually still on the Net: http://gaildelacruz.com/kutitots/v6yinyang/

Seriously though… I just thought that it might be better to just concentrate on my strengths (I can’t take away the fact that static sites was my starting point in 1996) and just leave animation to Marc, where he’s obviously better than me. Besides, ever since we did this specialization thing between us, our production time became faster.

P_WP: Before working on Wordpress, have you tried any other similar CMS package? Like Textpattern, Mambo/Joomla?

Gail: I’ve used Mambo once for a client. But for my personal use? No. I used Movable Type for about a year ago for Kutitots though… Until it crashed on me and I had no way of changing blog platforms except for republishing about 150 entries That screw up happened when there was a CPanel upgrade and apparently, MT wasn’t compatible with it. I didn’t want to mess with my CPanel, so I just abandoned MT altogether and switched to WordPress… One of the best decisions I’ve ever made, I must say.

P_WP: OMG! 150 entries, I am not going to do that. As for designing, what other websites you admire? Websites you look up too and draw inspiration from?

Gail: I really like Jeff Croft and Phu Ly’s works. I also love the way Bryan Veloso uses blue in Avalonstar (Blue is my favorite color). But Joshuaink’s flowery site is my favorite. If I want to see design trends, I go to Design Shack, CSS Beauty, and CSSimport. I actually go for designs that aren’t too minimalist (heck, I LOVE graphics). I started in 1996 as a graphic designer-hobbyist, so I really can’t not add graphics

P_WP: How long do you work in front of the computer on a daily average? And what do you do when you are not in front of the computer?

Gail: I can’t answer this question without sounding so geeky… I sleep at an average of 6 hours a day, eat a full meal (”brunch” most of the time) for about an hour, take a bath and do girly things for another hour… so that’s 24 minus 8… 16 hours!

That’s been my daily sched for about two years now (sometimes even during weekends). It was only recently that I cut down the days of “computer babad” to every other day and strictly implemented a “no-work-on-weekends” sched. Every other day, I’ll spend 16 hours in front of the computer… The rest of the days, only about 6 or 8. This gives me more than enough time to rest, prevent burnout, and have time to manage this novelty invitations and souvenirs business I started with my sister and cousins: Filipino Artisans (hehe plugging!).

P_WP: Girly and geeky, sounds cool to me. I know you love your dogs, and based on your blog, you are preparing to get married. Has your fiancée ever get jealous with your love for your dogs?

Gail: Oh yes. We fight over them ALL the time Actually, we argue over one specific dog: Choknat. He’s one of my three favorite dogs, and both he and Marc are at each other’s throats every time they see one another. Marc scared Choknat during the dog’s “formative” years, and I guess he took it to heart and never forgave him LOL. But other than that… Marc pretty much gets along well with my dogs, especially Sheero, our number one girl.

P_WP: What is the name of you favorite dog and why he/she is your favorite?

Gail: It’s Sheero. Marc and I love her so much that we incorporated our media company under her name

Sheero is actually Marc’s present to me. He gave her to us at a timely moment: my 12-year-old cat had just passed away when she came. She was actually the first ever “replacement” for my long-time pet, that’s why she became the closest to me. My other two favorites, Harry and Choknat, are her sons so the two just came later on. But Sheero was the first.

P_WP: Is Marc, your husband-to-be also in the same field of study as you? Like you do tech talk conversations on dates?

Gail: Haha. Worse than that. We sometimes spend our dates in front of the computer. I’m not kidding. The worse was probably spending my 24th birthday “dinner” in front of the PC and rushing a print ad design

Marc and I both love art and computers… But he’s more into video editing and animation that web/graphics design. I don’t have much patience for frame-by-frame stuff, he does. Most of the sites with animation on my portfolio were done by Marc (except for the old Flash version of Kutitots and my old portfolio). I design everything in Photoshop, chop it up, code it then turn over to him the PSDs that need animating in Flash.

It’s kind of geeky, but at least no one can say we’re not spending enough time together. Hehe.

P_WP: We are straying away from the Wordpress topics, lets go back. Any Wordpress plugin you cannot live without?

Gail: For my own use (personal or business), I really like Keyvan Minoukadeh’s Paged Comments plugin and Ryan Duff’s Contact Form plugin. The Paged Comments plugin makes pages with a lot of comments look organized. I frankly don’t like skimming through pages that are too long (That’s one of the main reasons why I put The_Excerpt tag on my themes’ home page loop instead of The_Content). The Contact Form… I can’t say that I CAN’T live without it, but it’s mighty useful when I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to make my own contact form for a site I’m doing that’s running on WordPress.

These aren’t much, I know. To be honest, I try as much as possible not to use plugins unless absolutely necessary. For my sites, I’m willing to put plugins if it’s cool. But for my clients’… Well, I’m a bit skeptical about it due to the possible issues that can arise. Most of the existing plugins have coding that are totally foreign to me. And if it’s on my clients’ site, I will have a problem supporting it. At least if it’s on my own site, I can just take it out when it’s not working.

P_WP: In the world of SEO, Wordpress Templates are great Google PageRank machines with all that inbound links from the template footer. Derek’s template has given him a PR5 which can be done with quality inbound linking and other good SEO practices. Passing the PR5 mark is usually a challenge of getting a bunch of high PR sites linked to you and getting a large volume as well. Your FilipinoWebDesigner.com page is already PR6. Is this something you are happy about or you are not really into SEO stuff right now?

Gail: Oh yes. I’m more than happy about it… But very surprised. I haven’t really checked my PageRank until you said my site is already at PR6!

The idea of the FilipinoWebDesigner.Com was for me to have a web design blog (frankly, I sometimes can’t blog about serious things on Kutitots such as web design due to the different type of audience). I’m really glad that it’s become more than that.

Aside from the use of Filipino words as theme titles, I try as much as possible to give a little “Pinoy” lesson on the ReadMe.TXT files of my themes. I don’t know… I guess I just wanted Pinoys to be recognized somehow (even in little ways) in the international WordPress community. There’s just something about learning that a certain work is done by a Pinoy. You get a feeling of affinity, makes you feel proud. I guess one of the reasons that got me into this whole Filipino-titled theme thing was when I first found out from Abe that Kates Gasis was Pinoy. I was using the KGArchives on my holiday Kutitots theme, and never knew it was done by a “kababayan.” Knowing that a really popular plugin was made by a Filipino makes you just want to say, “ASTIG,” and feel that you’re part of it somehow.

P_WP: Yeah, we are all proud to be Pinoy! There was a time in the late 90’s I owned both kalayaan.com and kalayaan.net and domains were still $35. I was in the Philippines, and was not earning much. So gave them away, sayang. Wait, we are talking about you, not me. LOL. The Isla Theme is now out, I like the scalability of the left column, how it adjust with the width, full CSS sites passing W3C validation. Do you always strive to make your sites W3C compliant?

Gail: Tricky question. I remember being asked a similar question at the first iBlog Summit. But my answer will remain the same: It depends on the client, the work, and the team involved. If it’s for a client who doesn’t care much how a site is coded as long as it looks exactly like the design draft I presented, I would go full CSS and W3C validated. But sometimes, I still get clients who specifically request to use tables instead. There are really just some people who don’t feel comfortable with it (their personal preferrence, I guess). But since it’s their site and they’re paying for it, what the heck

There are also instances when I’m working on a collaborative project with a “hard” coder (you know… geniuses when it comes to coding, but are scared shit when faced with a Photoshop task), like an OScommerce site for example. Most coders I’ve worked with aren’t comfortable with using DIV tags, and in these instances, it’s more productive to just forget about W3C validation and full CSS.

Like Derek, I get a happy feeling when I see the green “Passed Validation!” notice. When I know at the start of a project that the site will not validate, I don’t check it anymore so I won’t feel bad about seeing a red notice

P_WP: I think those programmers just do not know what they are doing and are old-school-tables-people. Lastly… are we expecting more of Gail in PinoyWordpress.com? Sharing a tip or two to the Pinoy Wordpress community?

Gail: Of course. I actually try to inject a bit of tutorials whenever I answer support questions for my themes. Abe (Yugatech), Luis (Gibbity), and I were actually planning something like this, but are just too busy to do anything about it. So yes, you’ll definitely see more of me here

P_WP: Yes, I understand. Making blogs just uses so much time. Even PinoyWordpress.com is taking some slow development since everyone is busy. So we are stuck with Kubrick right now, LOL. Any last words for the PinoyWordpress Community?

Gail: Thanks for featuring me here. It’s a great honor

I really look forward to taking part in this community, and help as much as I can for the love of WordPress Kudos to Benj for putting this all together.

Gail Dela Cruz won the Best Use of Colors and 2nd Place Overall Winner in the Wordpress Theme Competition by ArenaWP. More about Gail and her work can be found on his website Kutitots. More information can also be found on her profile on the PhilWeavers’ website.

Interviewed by Benj Arriola of ActionOnline.
Benj’s PhilWeavers Profile

Right after I posted the winners of the Wordpress Theme Competition by ArenaWP on the PinoyWordpress.com blog, I decided to contact both Derek and Gail to get a interview. I emailed them almost at the same time with a very similar email sent. Almost like a template where I just changed a few lines. And Derek was the first one to reply. (Maybe Gail gets too much emails a day from her fans, maybe my email got buried but we hope to hear from her soon.)

P_WP: Hi and welcome to PinoyWordpress.com, let’s start out first with how you got started in the web industry. Are you more of a technical person that can present websites pretty well into some art form? Or are you more of an artist that learned some technical knowledge on how to make websites? What is your background?

Derek: I feel like I’ll hurt my head if I really sit down to think about this one. I think it would be better if I dropped a general background on how I came to find myself in this “aspiring” designer mode.

About two years ago I stumbled across a weblog by the name of UNEASYsilence. The site was a one man personal blog sharing strange and offbeat news. I soon found myself working alongside the site owner turned friend as a contributing editor. Soon enough, the site was due for a redesign. I guess that redesign is what started this whole hobby turned semi-serious web design phase that I’m living. I didn’t get too serious about learning of valid source code and accessibility until about 6 months ago. A classical newbie.

My main goal as far as web design is concerned are clean, consistent, bloat free pages.

P_WP: Very cool, so when did you start using Wordpress?

Derek: Exactly two years back in May of 2004 while contributing at UNEASYsilence. On the side I experimented (with semi-successful results) using a Blogger.com page for personal rants. I soon grew tiresome of the site and ultimately deleted any traces of it from existence. I managed to go a few month sans personal blogging before the WordPress.com beta invites started rolling out. I jumped on that bandwagon for a bit and built quite a following. Not surprisingly, I dropped that as well opting instead for my own hosted site at 5ThirtyOne.

P_WP: Do you mind sharing about 5ThirtyOne, how did you thought about that name? Is this like a date on May 31? Anniversary? Birthday? Or something about time, like 5:31.

Derek: Doesn’t anyone read the About pages on blogs anymore?! Kidding. It depends on what angle you’re coming from. 5-3-1 because it’s easier than 5-4-3-2-1. Or, 5.31 representing a date of significant value. I’ll leave it at that. I promised a few people I would come up with something a little more animated and far fetched. I’m still working on it.

P_WP: Why Wordpress? Have you tried other stuff like b2evolution, Drupal, Geeklog, e107, phpNuke, PostNuke, Mambo, Joomla etc?

Derek: I would have to say that the community and active development of WordPress is what convinced me to continue using the software on my personal site. I did have a chance to experiment with Mambo and Joomla but walked away soon after. There is something about the large WordPress community that reminds of many large families.

P_WP: Which reminds me of TextPattern. They are also like some kind of large family. And their unity is kind of different considering that some TextPattern users even joined together to come up with TextDrive which is a hosting company that they call “Community Owned.” Have you ever played around of heard about them?

Derek: I can’t say I’ve spent too much time with TextPattern so no comment I cant cheat on WordPress now can I?

P_WP: I noticed you comply to the W3C standards pretty well, how important is this to you?

Derek: Aside from assuring - to some degree - consistent results in multiple browsers across the board, validating source code helps to eliminate erroneous source code. To be honest, I get a tingly feeling when the W3C validator displays a “Passed validation” in green lettering.

P_WP: I hear ‘ya, yes the green lettering does give some level of satisfaction and is irritating to see those red letters, Haha. Now changing the topic, do you play around with Flash?

Derek: I don’t play around with Flash for a number of reasons. I hate the idea that a special plugin is required to view specific content. Rehash - I prefer websites with as little bloat as necessary. I drop Flash in the bloat boat. With the advances of CSS combined with AJAX, I can relax knowing that what little eye candy bits I do use on a page will degrade gracefully for readers visiting the site on an older computer or mobile browser.

Here’s a question for Flash designers, why the tiny pixel fonts? I know the average grandma can navigate basic XHTML / CSS pages. I’m not so sure how one might manage on a Flash page with tiny pixelated fonts.

P_WP: Very true, me too, I do not know what’s up with the pixel fonts. What about PHP, are you well versed in PHP/MySQL?

Derek: I’m going to say I have an intermediate understanding of PHP. WordPress is PHP driven so I guess I need to know a little something about the backend.

If there is something in particular I might find myself stumbling on, the plethora of documentation and the general knowledge of the community are all I need for support.

P_WP: I totally agree with you. Manual on PHP.net+Google to search for the solution is all you need. Maybe I will plug for two other communities like PHPUGPh.com and PHPHilippines.com. (sharing the link love) As for designing, any design influences? What website designs are those that inspire you or that you admire?

Derek: The following are a couple websites that I admire: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk, http://www.binarybonsai.com and http://shauninman.com/plete

As far as individuals I admire, I’ve been doing a great deal of research on work done by Maya Lin. More recently, her Systematic Landscapes exhibition. Inspiration was drawn from her physical surroundings.

While not at all web design related, I find work inspired by natural settings intriguing.

P_WP: Very nice website choices. They are influences of many modern web designers today. I haven’t heard of Maya Lin though and I checked her out for a few seconds and she indeed has some impressive work too. Going back to Wordpress stuff, what Wordpress Plugins you cannot live without?

Derek: Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis.

P_WP: Christine Davis is also an excellent theme maker too. I like her work. How much time do you spend in front of the computer? And when not in front of the computer, what are your other hobbies, sports or special interest?

Derek: The time I spend in front of the computer depends on whether or not I have project deadlines to meet. I guess it would be safe to say that I am online for about 10 hours of the day. This includes casual browsing, catching up on blogs, searching for offbeat news to post on UNEASYsilence, and any random browsing I do from my mobile phone.

I have discovered that spending too much time on a computer actually hampers productivity. For that reason, if I am not online, I find myself doodling ideas out on a Moleskine notebook, eating, sleeping, and spending time with someone special.

P_WP: Just a geeky question about your mobile phone, is your phone running, Windows Mobile? PalmOS? or SymbianOS?

Derek: None of the above. Sadly, I am limited to a Samsung A-920. The upside is that I get unlimited everything, including Ev-DO access.

P_WP: Can you give us a brief story on your Filipino background. Where your parents from, what province, did you grow up in the US? Spent any long periods of time in the Philippines? Do you still speak Tagalog?

Derek: I must admit that I am a little rough around the edges regarding my Filipino background. I actually had to call my family members to recheck my answers. Both my parents are from the Philippines. Much of the family moved stateside back in the 70’s. Once side originating from Pampanga, the other from Manila. It’s true. However cliche the answer of “oh I’m from the Philippines, Manila to be exact” is, it’s very much true. My moms side of the family, the Almeda’s, used to manufacture food processing equipment.

As far as spending time in the Philippines… Apparently I flew back when I was 8 months old. Not surprisingly, I don’t remember a thing. One of these days I hope to fly back to spend a month or two with family. While I do understand Tagalog, i think traveling back would be a great opportunity to learn how to speak fluently.

P_WP: Which is Better? American chicks or hot pinays?

Derek: Treading in shark infested waters with this question. In an attempt to keep my head above the water, I’ll just say that I’ve never had an “opportunity” present itself involving what you call an “American chick”. However, I will say that I have dipped my toes into the non-Pinay waters.

Pinay or not, lumpia will always put a grin on my face. Now that I’m thinking about it, Chinese have eggrolls, Koreans have bulgogi, and Japanese have sushi. I think your question should have been based on food.

P_WP: Good suggestion… Do you love Adobo? Or any other Pinoy dish like Kare-kare?

Derek: Kare-kare. I know I’m missing something else…

P_WP: Any last few words for the PinoyWordpress.com community?

Derek: Well first off, I’d like to thank Benj for the recognition. I try my best to give back to the WordPress community whenever I can so don’t be strangers I look forward to exploring the rest of the Filipino community who just so happen to be powered by WordPress. Blogs are usually my window to the rest of the world and as you are all now aware, I have some cultural catching up to do.

P_WP: Thanks also for the interview. We look forward to see you part of the mailing list and if you have the time, maybe you can contribute some Wordpress stories on the blog.

Derek: Sounds good

Derek Punsalan recently won for the Most Creative Design in the Wordpress Theme Competition by ArenaWP. More about Derek and his work can be found on his website 5ThirtyOne.

Interviewed by Benj Arriola of ActionOnline.

Several excellent artist in the Wordpress world, has come up with a Wordpress Theme Competition and was all hosted on the website ArenaWP and in their recent competition, two Pinoys have been victorious in creating their Wordpress Themes. These Filipino web designers were:

• Gail Dela Cruz - Kutitots
• Derek Punsalan - 5ThirtyOne

Both are deserving artist. I see Derek’s work not only truly artistic with good use of colors, he complies to standards very well too and being W3C compliant with well validating websites gives you a higher percentage of cross-browser compatibility. Faint gradients, high contrast, very similar to Web 2.0 inspired websites, something common I guess with Mac users as the Mac simple, minimalist style comes out with Apple’s influence. Clean with good use of blank space in his layouts.

Derek’s entry won the Most Creative Design for the Wordpress Theme FoilageMod.

I still remember Gail’s old full Flash website when I was a semi-finals judge for the Philippine Web Awards last year as she entered in the Personal Website category and full Flash websites seemed to start to get out of style with many people. Today, Gail has changed her full Flash website into a Wordpress work of art and has been actively creating theme that are really impressive that upon first look, you will not suspect you are looking at a Wordpress blog. Gail being active in the blogging world was also a speaker at the first iBlog event, Philippines 1st blogging summit that recently held it’s second round.

Gail’s entries won 2nd place as the Best Overall Design for the Wordpress Theme Kurtina and Best Use of Colors for the Wordpress Theme Dapit Hapon.

The rest of the winners of the event can be viewed on the ArenaWP website. Congratulations to Wordpress users from the Philippines, Filipino Wordpressers PinoyWordpress.com is proud about. May they serve inspiration to the rest of the Pinoy Wordpress community.

When to use permalinks and trackbacks? This has been my question before and most likely to be the question of most as well. First, what are trackbacks?

Here’s a useful definition according to wikipedia:

TrackBack is a mechanism for the communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping“; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.

Blogging software that supports the TrackBack protocol displays a “TrackBack URL” along with every entry. This URL is used by the commenting blogger, whose software will send XML-formatted information about the new entry to this URL. Some blogging tools are able to discover these TrackBack URLs automatically, others require the commenting blogger to enter them manually.

The TrackBack specification is due to Six Apart who first implemented it in their Movable Type blogging software in 2002. It has since been implemented in most other blogging tools. Six Apart started a working group in February 2006 to improve the Trackback protocol and have it potentially approved as an internet standard by the IETF. One notable blogging tool that does not support trackback yet is Blogger.

Some individuals or companies have abused the TrackBack feature to insert spam links on some blogs (see sping). This is similar to comment spam but avoids some of the safeguards designed to stop the latter practice. As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many weblog publishing systems. Many blogs have stopped using trackbacks because dealing with spam became too burdensome.

Aside from trackbacks, there is also what we call a pingback which can also be found in wikipedia. Essentially, pingbacks and trackbacks are the same.

So when do we use trackbacks? With the advent of modern day blogging tools such as Wordpress, the issue is actually no longer an issue since wordpress automatically automatically detects the trackback URL if there is any on the page that you link to.

Here’s another URL that might help though it’s for MovableType. But it does show the “sense” in using trackbacks.

Lastly, in wordpress, you can force pinging of trackback URLs by entering them in the “Trackbacks” field when you write a new post. The trackbacks field can be usually found below the “editor” when posting.

Hope this helps!

So you are in search of the best forum to place on your Wordpress blog? It took me a while, as I searched and searched and search, Wordpress forum plugin, Wordpress message board plugin, Wordpress bulletin board plugin and a lot of the search results were just people on a forum talking about what could be a good forum to add. I remember finding more than one, but the others had no demo page and once there is not demo page, I get turned off and I do not even try it at all.

So I ended up using XD Forum plugin for Wordpress. I had no major challenges in installing it. And since many forums are walls of text, I said to myself, forget the 800×600 resolution, the people who are going to view my site are mostly computer people anyway since it was for computer students, so I assume they should have at least 1024×768 resolution on their monitors, since a forum in 800×600 is not a good sight. So I looked for a good 1024×768 theme so the forum would fit in well and I decided to use TypoXP.

After following instructions given on their website, it was pretty straight forward and I had no problems at all following the instructions.

My first challenge was the forum was too wide and was causing the right sidebar to float below the main content. And to solve that problem, the whole forum goes inside a div tag and gives it a class named: narrowcolumn, just give that div tag a width and that should control the width of the forum and just make sure get it to the right precision you need to the pixel with the corresponding margins and paddings. It may be a bit challeging to those who do not speak in CSS and may be easier or harder with some Wordpress templates.

Once installed, you just create the groups (the general category separation of topics) and forums (subcategories of the groups) and you are done. The users that signup will come up with the thread topics. And if ever there was a hard time I have where I needed some thinking, it was thinking of how will I organize the groups and forums.

I really have no point of comparison if installing this plugin is easier than other plugins since this is my first plugin, but I was told it deserved a posting to share on this blog to all Pinoy Wordpressers, so here I am, sharing the information. Now it is time for the others to teach me new tricks too!

Check my implementation of XD Forum on Informatics Students, Where Informatics Students Worldwide Meet!

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