All About Pingbacks and Trackbacks

By Pankaj May 7, 2007 filed in Miscellaneous

Conceptually, pingbacks and trackbacks are simple but could prove to be little confusing at the start as it was the case with one of my colleague . He asked me series of questions related to trackbacks and pingbacks to get his doubts cleared. Here is the conversation which I had with him and I hope this would help you as well in case you have any doubts on this topic. His questions are in bold text.

What are trackbacks and pingbacks anyway? I know these are the methods of communicating between blogs and are used to notify the blog authors about the inclusion or reference of their article/posts by other bloggers..
As you rightly mentioned above, both of these are very similar in nature yet very differernt. Let’s see this with an example. Let’s say I have read a post on your blog and I would like to write a post on the same topic as is yours. I would like you to know that I have read your post, found it interesting and I have written about the same in my blog (for my reader of course). This is the situation where notification methods like trackback and pingback comes in picture. When I write a post on my blog, I will send a pingback/trackback notification to your blog. Your blogging software, on the receipt of my notification will display excerpt from my post along with a link back to my post as a comment in your blog post. Benifit is that readers of your blog will be able to read what I have to say about your post (by reading my comments sent as trackback/pingback) and my reader will also get to know about what I have to say about your blog. Readers of both the blogs can comment on either of the posts as they know a way to reach other’s post now by means of the link provided. So as I said, they are very similar in their purpose. As a matter of fact, pingbacks were designed to overcome some of the shortcomings in Trackback. Read More »

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Language Translation - WordPress Plugins Review

By Pankaj April 25, 2007 filed in Internet Marketing

Arnab who has written earlier about rising importance of languages beyond English in his posts (What slice of the Internet Pie is English speaking? and All Eggs in the English Basket?). So while creating the new theme I took up the task of including the language translation feature in AskPankajAndArnab.com and started to look for various ways of doing it. As everyone is aware of the fact that one can translate the entire webpage from one language to another using Google language translator and Babelfish language translator so all I had to do was to find a WordPress plugin (as this blog is powered by WordPress) which can do the job for us. This post pretty much talks about my findings about various WordPress plugins available for language translation. Read More »

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Upgrade your WordPress to 2.1.2

By Pankaj March 5, 2007 filed in Miscellaneous

If at all, someone reading this blog hasn’t heard the news from WordPress.org about upgrading your WordPress 2.1.1 to 2.1.2. Here is what Matt has to say in short …

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

According to this news, someone has broke into one of the WordPress servers and modified the download file for WordPress 2.1.1 version released couple of weeks back. Nothing else has been affected by the attack.

So go ahead, download your copy of latest version 2.1.2 and upgrade to be on the safer side as this release contains some security patches anyway. You could read the full story here - WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2.

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WordPress and AdSense Deluxe Plugin

By Pankaj November 21, 2006 filed in WordPress

Displaying contextual ads from Google AdSense program and Yahoo publishing network, while you write about your favorite topics in your blog posts has the potential of earning good amount of money. WordPress doesn’t really have a out of the box functionality to display these contextual ads but that does not really reduce the greatness of WordPress. It is still a fantastic blogging software. Am I being biased? May be, I just love WordPress.

Now if WordPress can’t display the Ads by itself, then Who can? The answer to this question is AdSense Deluxe plugin for WordPress. There are many other WordPress plugins can display various types of Ads in your blog posts but my favorite is AdSense Deluxe when it comes to displaying Google AdSense. Reasons, Well keep reading …

- Installation is easy as it is with most of WordPress plugins
- All settings are configured from WordPress Option Interface. No programming knowledge of any kind is required.
- AdSense display can be enabled/disabled for blog posts, pages, archive pages, home pages individually
- Enable / Disable of all ads with a click of one check box.
- Define and use any number of ad style and formatting and choose from them even on a post to post basis.
- Possibility of applying CSS formatting to adsense code.
- Placeholders are displayed while editing the posts / pages instead of live ads
- Option to preview the ad blocks and no penalty for clicking on them since they are shown using a test account.

Including the ad unit (defined in the AdSense Deluxe options page) in your template files, just calls for copying and pasting following code …

You can see it in action here in this blog. I have included the above code in my sidebar.php for this theme which always displays AdSense block in the sidebar of this blog.

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Which Blogging Software?

By Pankaj November 21, 2006 filed in CMS

When I was looking for a blogging solution for my own blog, I was planning to evaluate all the available blogging software but I was afraid that it could eat up lot of my time. One day when I finally thought of starting this process and searched the web for available blogging software, I came across following interesting resources which saved all my time …

1. Blog software comparison chart
2. Blog Software Breakdown
3. Blog Software Breakdown (Alternate Source)

Above are the comparison charts of almost all (being safe) blogging software based on various parameters. These charts will give you enough clarity to choose the right blogging software for yourself which suites your need. 2nd chart will also tell the test URL where you can try out the features before finalizing on anything.

There is another very useful resource for trying out various PHP/MySQL based free and open source software systems. This is called opensourceCMS. Click here to test and feel great products related to content management.

As for me, I decided to go ahead with WordPress. Reasons, that I will write some other day.

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