Overriding NoFollow in Links and Comments

I had a commenter recently who brought attention to the fact that he would not comment on my blog again unless I removed the nofollow in comments and commenter links. He made a good point but created an interesting problem that I thought I would blog about today.

First, about a year ago or maybe even more, WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad inserted into their source code an automatic nofollow in the source code of all comments and links left on a blog. There was no setting in the control panels to override this option.

However I for one encourage comments and do not have problems with people linking to a legitimate site if they leave a legitimate comment on my blog. But, how to override this global setting without access to a control panel to do so. Lucia’s Linky Love WordPress plug-in takes care of this problem. You install the plugin and then configure how many times a user needs to comment to have Linky Love turn on a dofollow tag in the comments and enable dofollow in any links they post.

This is an excellent tool to encourage regular visitors to comment and for them to get something back in return for commenting as well as removing spam comments and posters.

I have enabled Lucia’s Linky Love on my blog, so I invite you to be a regular participant and receive link love as a reward!

WordPress 2.7 Code Named Coltrane

Loving WordPress 2.7!
Loving WordPress 2.7!

I’ve heard from a few interested parties asking for more information about WordPress 2.7 and is it worth the upgrade. I have to say wholeheartedly YES it is worth the upgrade!

WordPress is free, but the time and effort to install it is not. The first time I installed it, it took under 2 hours. So, why is it worth the under around two hour time investment?

  1. Once you upgrade to WordPress 2.7 you will never need to do a manual upgrade again. WordPress will upgrade the application itself. That alone is well worth the trouble.
  2. With WordPress 2.7 your plugins can be upgraded automatically with one click. Wow, that’s another good reason to make the installation worth the trouble.
  3. The site navigation, has moved from the top to the left and offers drop down options. No more poking around trying to find where to update settings for a plugin.
  4. Improved image upload. For me this is one of the biggest new features. My Flash based upload function stopped working when I upgraded to Flash Player 10. Installing WordPress 2.7 fixed this plus gave me some nice new options for images such as adding a caption and very simply image upload interface. I know that my blog writers will now easily be able to add a photo to a blog when they want from the 2.7 platform unlike some earlier versions of WordPress that really need someone who understands source code to go in to to view source and remove broken code that keeps an image from showing up.

All in all, I think that WordPress 2.7 is an excellent upgrade even to version 2.6.1 or 2.6.2. Once you’ve installed it, I think that you’ll agree it is well worth the several hours it takes to install it.

WordPress Content Field Broken

I just solved the very weirdest WordPress problem and wanted to share the resolution with you. One of our client’s has a WordPress blog, and our blogger emailed today to say that the add a link field was totally whited out and what should she do.

 I logged into the blog and found that I could not even get my cursor to lay on the post box, I could add a title and tags, but could not write a post.

The bottom line resolution was in options and under the address for the blog, it had been changed to http://WWW.blog.com and previously had been set as http://blog.com no WWW.  The admin link on the blog was http://blog.com no www.  When I now access the admin with a www. in front of the URL everything works just peachy, I can see the link field, I can see and write a post. Now the admin link in the sidebar needs to be corrected to reflect the www. addition.

Who would have thought that hours would bring the answer with such a simple solution. So if your content box is broken on WordPress, if you are getting post editing JavaScript errors in WordPress, or if you cannot edit your WordPress blog, try this simple change before you start hacking your code. It has taken me five hours of research to resolve my little problem so I hope that you personally start with my post first and save tons of time.