What Are Pingbacks And Trackbacks And How Do I Use Them?

The terms pingbacks and trackbacks are used almost interchangeably, and are pretty much the same thing on the surface. They actually utilize different technologies and originated for different purposes, but these days they are becoming more intertwined. I’m just going to call them trackbacks for the purpose of this post.

What are they?

Essentially both are forms of notifications or communications between blogs.

For example, if I write a blog post and in it I link to a blog post on another site, an excerpt of my post containing the link will show up on that blogger’s site in their Comments section, along with a link back to my post. Since trackbacks are handled through comments, the blogger gets to moderate it like any other comment. So he/she will be able to see that I referenced their blog and if they approve the comment I now have a link from their site to mine. This is a trackback.

Read More

Getting Started With WordPress – Explaining Settings

Once you’ve got your WordPress blog installed, there are a few tweaks you’ll want to make to the default settings. This is a quick overview of  the Settings area of the WP dashboard. You don’t have to tweak, or necessarily understand every single option – you can use this a rough guide as to what to pay attention to.

PERMALINKS

This is a Very Important Section!
I was going to go over each section in the order they appear in the navigation bar, but the permalinks setting is at the bottom and this is one of the most important sections. You are definitely going to want to change the default setting here so that your blog posts will have search-engine friendly urls with words in them, instead of the numbers that come with the default.

Read More