I just discovered the WordPress External Links plugin and couldn’t be happier with it. The plugin only has a couple functions but the SEO benefit seems to really be amazing. The External Links plugin will add a “nofollow” tag to all of the links on your WordPress blog which tells search engines to not count the link against your page rank. An extra benefit of the plugin is the fact that it adds a small external link icon at the end of each external link so readers of your WordPress blog know that they will be leaving the site. One other function of the plugin is you can make all external links open in a new window though I chose not to enable this because I cannot stand when reading articles and when I click on a link and it opens a new window.

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I recently downloaded and installed the WordPress iPhone application for an easier way to manage blogs from my iPhone. The application provides a really nice interface to manage WordPress blog comments, posts, and pages. The first blog I configured without issue however the second blog would not let me connect providing an error stating XML-RPC services were disabled on the WordPress blog. This is a really easy error to resolve and the details are posted in the error message that appears on your iPhone. Below are instructions and images related to correcting the error message displayed.

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It is easy to use your default WordPress admin interface to block comments from a certain domain. You can either have these comments require moderation or you can have the comments immediately marked as spam. My suggestion would be to initially have the comments require moderation just to make sure you are not also catching legit comments.

To block comments based on a certain domain follow the steps below.

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This works for .html.erb files:

<% begin %>
<% if current_user.is_super_admin? %>
<p> this block will be commented out</p>
<% end %>
<% end %>

‘causing a section to not be rendered’ , you would want to do <% if false %> .. <% end %>

In an attempt to promote as much community as possible I would suggest removing the Website field for when people post comments to your WordPress blog. In this scenario below the Mandingo Theme is being used however it is just as easy to remove the Website field from the default field as well. If people still want to post their web site when making a comment they can do so in the body of the comment.

If you are using the Mandingo Theme then you will need to modify two files but if using the default WordPress Theme you should only need to modify one file. The lines to remove should be the same or very similar no matter what Theme you are using.

In Mandingo follow the below directions to remove the Website field from the comments form when people are not logged in.

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