JoeBailey.ORG

As recommended by John Chow, this is one of the things you must install/activate. It wasn’t that hard to do and instructions are below. What is Akismet? Akismet helps to kill spamming on your blog.

On several websites, I have “Contact Us” forms. These forms are always sending emails stating things like, “This site is great”, “Thanks for the site”, etc. I’m guessing all of these spam emails come from software that can search a site and fill in a form automatically. So, if Akismet can prevent this same type of activity on my blog, I’m all for it. Would be nice to have it for regular website forms. If anyone knows of any solutions for regular website forms, feel free to let me know.

Anyway, to install it:
1. Log into the admin
2. Click on the top navigation called “Plugins”
3. Click on the “Activate” link in the row titled “Akismet”. Mine is listed in green to show it has been activated.
4. To complete the activation, you must have a WordPress API key. If you don’t have the key, don’t worry about it. There are instructions that will help guide you to get an API key. It really encompasses registering at http://www.wordpress.com.

WordPress dynamically creates all of your page names and they typically look like this. http://www.joebailey.org/?p123. The problem with this is that it’s not the best for search engines. Of course, search engines may still find your site, but if you made a couple of small changes to WordPress, it will help people find you better in search engines.

The answer is Permalinks - Permalinks allow you to create a custom url based on your preferences. so, instead of http://www.joebailey.org/?p123 you could have http://www.joebailey.org/building-a-blog/configuring-search-friendly-urls-in-wordpress/

Here are the steps to do it.
1. Login to the administrator in WordPress
2. In the top navigation, click on “Options”
3. In the sub navigation, click on “Permalinks”
4. Select the radio button titled “Custom, specify below”
5. In the custom structure box, type in /%category%/%postname%/
6. At the bottom of the page, click on the button titled “Update Permalink Structure” and that’s it.
7. As a precaution, test it out, by writing a new post.