Interacting with Readers through Comments

People can leave notes for you that are published to your site, and you can respond and engage your readers in conversation about the topic at hand (refer to Figure 5-1 and Figure 5-2). Having this function in your blog creates the opportunity to expand the thoughts and ideas that you present in your blog post by giving your readers the opportunity to share their own thoughts.

In the WordPress Dashboard, you have full administrative control over who can and can't leave comments. In addition, if someone leaves a comment that has questionable content, you can edit the comment or delete it. You're also free to disallow comments on your blog. The Discussion Settings page in your Dashboard contains all the settings for allowing, or disallowing, comments on your site; flip back to Book III, Chapter 3 to dig into those settings, what they mean, and how you can use them to configure the exact interactive environment that you want for your site.

Tracking back

The best way to understand trackbacks is to think of them as comments, except for one thing: Trackbacks are comments left on your blog by other blogs, not by actual people. Although this process may sound mysterious, it's actually perfectly reasonable.

A trackback happens when you make a post on your blog and, within that post, you provide a link to a post made by another blogger in a different blog. When you publish that post, your blog sends a sort of electronic memo to the blog you linked to. That blog receives the memo and posts an acknowledgment of receipt in a comment within the post that you linked to on their site.

That memo is sent via a network ping (a tool used to test, or verify, whether a link is reachable across the Internet) from your site to the site you link to. This process works as long as both blogs support trackback protocol. Trackbacks can also come to your site by way of a pingback — which, really, is the same thing as a trackback, but the terminology varies from blog platform to blog platform.

Sending a trackback to a blog is a nice way of telling the blogger that you like the information she presented in her blog post. Every blogger appreciates the receipt of trackbacks to their posts from other bloggers. Figure 5-3 shows one trackback link, below the Who's Linking Here header.

Comment and trackback display

Almost every single WordPress theme displays comments at the bottom of each post published in WordPress. You can do custom styling of the comments so that they match the design of your site by using several items:

• WordPress template tags: Tags related to the display of comments and trackbacks. For more on these tags, see Book VI, Chapter 3.
• Basic HTML: Using HTML markup helps you provide unique styles to display content. For information about the use of basic HTML, check out Book VI.

  Figure 5-3: Trackback links on a blog.

  

• CSS: Every WordPress theme has a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) template called style.css. Within this CSS template, you define the styles and CSS markup that creates a custom look and feel for the comment and trackback display on your site. You can find more information about using CSS in Book VI.
• Graphics: Using graphics to enhance and define your branding, style, and visual design is an integral part of Web design. Because we can't fully cover graphic design in a single chapter, you may want to check out WordPress Web Design For Dummies, which Lisa wrote, for great information on graphic and Web-site design with WordPress (published by Wiley).
• WordPress widgets: WordPress has a built-in widget to display the most recent comments published to your site by your visitors. You also can find several plugins that display comments in different ways, including top comments, most popular posts based on the number of comments, comments that display the author's photo, and more. For information about widgets and plugins for these purposes, flip to Book VI, Chapter 1 and Book VII, Chapters 1 and 2, respectively.