Many of the WordPress settings described within this chapter exist for Blogger as well and are located under the various menus within Settings.
For example, you can define blog authors in Settings > Basic. The author name that appears in your posts will be obtained from the Google account that is associated with your blog.
Look within Settings > Basic and Settings > “Language and formatting” to set your blog title, tagline, and time zone settings.
Settings > “Mobile and email” enables you to define options for posting by email or through a mobile phone, as well as define the email address that should receive a notification when a new comment is posted. Settings > “Posts and comments” allows you define your comment policy as well as the number of posts that should be shown on your home page.
Your feed options are available in Settings > Other. There you’ll be able to specify your FeedBurner URL (more on FeedBurner in Chapter 4, Customizing and Fine- Tuning Your Blog, on page 55). Also, you can, and should, enable a mobile version of your blog within the Template page.
Finally, your blog’s privacy should be set to “Listed on Blogger” in Settings > Basic. This will make it visible to search engines.
Writing Settings
Click the Writing submenu under Settings. Here you can customize a few details that relate to posting. The only sections that are really worth your attention are “Post via e-mail,” Remote Publishing, and Update Services. The first two are useful if you want to publish posts directly by email (I don’t generally recommend that you do this, though) or through a client (for example a desktop client like Windows Live Writer for Windows or MarsEdit for Mac). The third one, Update Services, is crucial if you wish to notify a series of so- called ping services of your blog’s updates. These services will in turn inform search engines of your updates so that your new posts will be indexed quickly. You should see the default rpc.pingomatic.com, which is more than good enough. If you don’t see it, you absolutely need to add it for the aforementioned SEO reasons.
Reading Settings
Reading Settings is where you define how many posts you’d like to see featured on your home page and how many of your entries should appear in a new subscriber’s feed reader. It’s up to you to decide what numbers you’d like to input here. Ten is a healthy compromise that pushes your content without
overwhelming new visitors and subscribers. Start with the defaults and remember not to sweat the small stuff.
A much bigger and insidious issue is the debate of full vs. partial feed. An overwhelming majority of people will want a full feed in order to read your articles in Google Reader or in other feed readers of their choice. However, there is also a minority who might be annoyed by the wealth of content you share with them if you opt for full feed. You can’t win this one or make everyone happy, so there’s no sense in trying. In short, leave every setting in this section as it appears in the defaults.
Discussion Settings
In the Discussion Settings tab, you can customize your commenting policy and notifications entirely. Personally, I like to leave everything set to the defaults, with the following exceptions:
• Uncheck “Anyone posts a comment” and “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” and instead go with “An administrator must always approve the comment.” This enables comment moderation, with a single notification given by email when a new comment has been posted and is being held for approval.
• Switch the default avatar to one of the generated choices (Identicon is the most professional-looking, in my opinion). Doing so will help make it more obvious if someone is using sock puppets (i.e., commenting multiple times while pretending to be different people) to amplify a viewpoint with multiple comments in the same thread. It’s not foolproof—changing IP via a proxy will change the generated avatar image—but it makes the job a bit harder and it may discourage a few overzealous commenters in the process. No doubt the most controversial statement in this chapter is my recommen- dation that you moderate comments. Moderation may slightly lower the overall number of comments you receive and the level of engagement seen in the comments your posts bring in, but doing so has several advantages when dealing with trolls, spammers, and flame wars that can arise from time to time in the comment section of your blog.
If you are ideologically opposed to the idea, simply uncheck the “An adminis- trator must always approve the comment” option and instead check off that you want to be notified when “Anyone posts a comment.” This way you’ll at least know about new comments that are being posted and can then reply or remove them (if they’re not appropriate) afterward.
Enable Akismet Antispam
Akismet is a must-have plugin for dealing with spam unless you are using a third-party commenting system that already includes some form of spam control. The current settings that we have in place now should guarantee that no spam is going to end up on your blog. The problem is that you’ll still receive numerous email messages for spam comments that you need to manually reject.
Akimset, which ships with WordPress but is inactive by default, can take care of this for us. Click the Plugins menu item and activate Akismet. Once acti- vated, this plugin will ask you for an API key that can be obtained by signing up at akismet.com.
You may be unsure about which plan is right for you. If your blog is for a small company, you should go for the pro plan. Otherwise, you (large corpo- rations excluded) can safely opt for the free plan and upgrade later if you start making some serious cash from your blog.
This plugin, in conjunction with the actual Akismet service, tends to do a pretty good job. You won’t have to sort through thousands of spam comments and trackbacks.
Trackbacks or pingbacks are link notifications from other blogs that have
mentioned your post. In most themes they appear just above the comment section. They are so widely abused by spammers looking for free links to their sites that many people prefer to disable trackbacks in Discussion Settings. The occasional false positive (genuine comments that are initially seen as spam) or false negative (spam comments that reach your inbox for approval) will still crop up with Akismet, but using this service will make your life so much easier.
Alternatively, some bloggers have shown a preference for Defensio over Akismet due to the presence of more advanced features such as a profanity filter.14
Alternative Commenting Systems
Over the past few years, a new breed of alternative commenting system has been emerging. The basic idea behind it is that you can embed a new comment system in place of the standard one. These commenting systems tend to have some bells and whistles that make them attractive, such as the ability for your readers to log in via Twitter or Facebook before leaving a comment as well as good built-in spam control. Their popularity also implies that many
users, particularly technical ones, will already have an account with the major players in this field. If they don’t, they can register at one blog that uses them and reuse that account on any other blog that uses the same system. Three popular options are Disqus, IntenseDebate, and more recently, Facebook Comments.15 Facebook, in particular, is ubiquitous with users, be they technical or not, and would in theory make for an excellent choice. In fact, it even won over the popular blog TechCrunch, despite the less-than-enthusiastic reaction from some commenters (Facebook isn’t exactly loved by everyone). Facebook Comments are automatically arranged by popularity (i.e., the number of “Likes”) and also enable you to see the real names of most of your commenters. If they’re logged into Facebook when commenting on your blog, users’ comments will be automatically associated with their Facebook profiles. When people comment with their real name, they tend to be a lot more civil and careful in what they say. Unless commenters uncheck the option to do so, their comments on your post will also appear on their friends’ News Feeds, along with a link back to your article, further spreading your post via the popular social network.
However, three negative aspects need to be considered before uploading and activating a plugin for an alternative commenting system such as Facebook’s: • Dynamically loading the content from a third-party site tends to signifi- cantly slow down your pages’ loading time. This has a negative impact from both a UX and an SEO standpoint.
• Third-party commenting systems are usually not “crawlable” by search engines. Their content will not be indexed, so you may miss out on showing up in the SERP for quite a few keywords that were organically included in the comment section by your commenters. (Some new plugins are emerging, such as Crawlable Facebook Comments, that try to coun- teract this problem).
• A third party will own your comments. Should this party change its policies or go out of business, you may or may not be able to revert back to the regular built-in WordPress comment system without data loss. As usual when dealing with third parties, there is a risk for vendor lock-in, so ensure that you carefully read the conditions and export options before committing.
15. disqus.com, intensedebate.com, and developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments, respec- Configure WordPress
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49If you want to switch to Facebook Comments, I recommend Facebook Com- ments for WordPress. You’ll find it, along with other alternative plugins, by searching for Facebook Comments in the Plugin directory located at word- press.org/extend/plugins or by clicking the “Add new” button after entering the Plugins area of your admin section.