Formatting a WordPress post

My partner doesn’t know anything about HTML, but asked me how to make her WordPress pages and posts look better. When I looked at what she’d done I realised she had simply typed in her entries — as any reasonable person would expect. The entries were a mess of <br> tags, with no marked-up headings, paragraphs or lists (all types of text she’d used).

I briefly debated with myself teaching her some rudimentary HTML, then remembered she was also setting up half a dozen others to contribute to the blog too. No, what was needed was a way to make it easy for the contributors to apply some formatting through the web interface. Much as I shudder to even think it, given that many people are familiar with a formatting toolbar in Word, something similar in WordPress would work well.

Since she was using Firefox I made sure to check Use the visual editor when writing in the Your Profile section of the Users section in the Dashboard.

That wasn’t very satisfactory though as it included buttons for bold and italic, but not for headings or paragraphs. Some searching soon led me by a convoluted path from Working Solo:

Advanced Wordpress Formatting:

Did you know that there was an advanced formating toolbar in Wordpress 2.1? …The key combinations to make this magic happen are:

Windows users : alt-shift-v (Firefox) or alt-v (Internet Explorer)

Mac Users : ctrl-v

to Solo Technology (links to the plugin’s page): First Release: Visualize Advanced Features:

This very simple little WordPress plugin shows the Advanced Toolbar button in your WordPress 2.1x WYSIWYG Post Editor. No more fumbling around for the correct hotkey to show these “hidden” buttons. Just click the button…

The Advanced Toolbar seems to do the trick. It includes a pop-up for headings at various levels and paragraphs, along with buttons for special characters, pasting from Word, and other formatting. The plugin adds a small button at the end of the standard toolbar — click it to show the Advanced Toolbar.

Remember that not all browsers display all the toolbars. If your favourite browser doesn’t offer a toolbar for use while editing posts, try Firefox, Flock or Opera which do.

Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free

As those of you who read my site regularly should know, I’ve been pretty POed about the blog spam and splogging situation. I subscribed to the Plagiarism Today feed because of its excellent articles about copyright and the fight against feed scraping by sploggers.

Today’s article about WordPress.com was an especially good read. From Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free on PlagiarismToday:

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s Wordpress.com . Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

The article author, Johnathan Bailey, interviewed WordPress founder Matthew Mullenweg to learn why WordPress.com is so spam-free. The article is enlightening and highly recommended.

Fighting Spam — All Kinds

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

• Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
• Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from my site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.

Series of posts

Maria has written an excellent series of posts about using WordPress as a CMS. The problem was locating them as a group and then being able to read them in sequence. The default behaviour in WordPress lists them in reverse order: number 7 before number 6 and so on.

In an attempt to make it easier to both locate series of posts and to then read them from first to last I’ve activated the Organize Series plugin.

There are full instructions on the author’s website, so I won’t repeat them here, but it does require determining a category ID and renaming a special file, as well as choosing a few simple settings in the Options area of the Dashboard. It’s not hard, or complicated, though, and makes a big difference in usability when you create series of posts.

Let us know what you think of it.

Print posts

A reader asked about how to print some of the posts from this site, so today I’ve added and activated Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan’s WP-Print 2.10 plugin.

On these pages you should now see a link and icon for printing a post. It appears just below the Filed under line. When you click the link you see the post specially formatted for printing. At the bottom of that page click the printing link and your printer’s options window should appear so you can choose print settings.

The plugin is easy to install: drop the folder called print into your plugins folder. Activate the plugin and then customise its options from the Print section of the Options area of the Dashboard. Finally add this code in the theme files where you wish the Print link to appear:
<?php if(function_exists('wp_print')) { print_link(); } ?>.

There are full installation and usage instructions at Lester’s site.

If you’ve found this printing facility useful, let us know in the comments.