A recent comment on my last post on  Comment Policy Plugin For Wordpress was written in Russian: По-моему, у Вас украли эту статью и поместили на другом сайте. Я её уже видела. Since I do not read Russian, I have to translate it and it actually says, “I think you stole this article and placed on another site. I had already seen.”

I certainly do not need to clarify why I posted the article as this is my homepage. Yet, comments like these bug me because it makes me wonder if readers can ’smell’ if posts have been plagarised, stolen or re-edited? I am feeling quite glad actually that you have made that comment. Otherwise I would not have been able to update this site this week for many reasons; I’ve not been online browsing for a few days. Now I have.

Here is a screenshot from subscribing to Gobala Krishnan’s website since 2008, click to see the bigger picture:

Topics on sales and marketing excite me less than website building tools. You can tell that I have only read two letters that do not have anything to do with sales and purchases.

Here’s the letter I received regarding his comment policy for wordpress:

Wordpress plugins are great to work with as long as you understand their uses and how to set them right. There are enough make money online blogs and sharing another one online just does not cut out for me. This letter however, is more of a teaching tool, no coupons attached.  If you have read the post correctly, credit to the creator of this plugin is given at the end of the post.

How do you know if a post has been plagarised, copied and re-edited? In other words, how is this not stolen?

1. You give credit (link) to the source of the article.
2. You do not give the reader option to download the plugin , software or script from your own website. (very importantly not to try this without prior permission to redistribute from your local domain.)
3. You use the explanation given by the source site and then always make reference back the source file in a hyperlink.

It is easy for me to understand this because every now and then, my own original post are linked word for word without any literature whatsoever to mention that it has come from my website,  except for two words “read more…..” Naughty naughty. That is pure cut and paste, lazy way of giving credit to the blogger who wrote.

Some people look for the about page to read about the author’s profile. I have not created my about page yet because I simply want to use this blog to focus on my journey online and not on myself. Maria Montessori is the only page I have got so far and that is because of my Montessori training background. You can read “How This Domain Is Inspired?”

Linking back to the source url is very important if you have indeed written something about or from another url. It shows your networking presence online and certainly open doors for readers who are interested in the topic to go right to the source with one click.

If you notice, headline news websites are great culprits for posting news word for word from the source without linking back to the source. Just type in Michael Jackson’s news and you can see for yourself. Read at least 5 news on the latest and you can certainly find the same form of writing and layout.

Yet another trick bloggers used to cut and past original text without linking back to the source url is by writing only the first 160 characters in his own words because in search engine optimisation (SEO) practice, only the first 160 and last few of the post will be crawled or spidered completely when a reader enter his keywords. I have read many myself and their google page rank is so high, you won’t believe it until you study the rest of the post.

Another more concrete way to determine if the blogger is genuine, you can look for this banner on his blog:

You can grab a banner for your website here Copyscape If you decide to use the banner, just make sure you follow some the rules of ‘white hat blogging’ code of conduct.

Having said that, the banner will be posted on this site from now onwards if that makes you happy.

This feature is available only to wordpress users who have their own domain name (self-hosted wordpress users) at wordpress.org. Wordpress.com, however, is a free hosting platform. You need not have to concern yourself with the changes. For new bloggers, who intend to use wordpress as the site building platform, it may be a better idea to create a psuedo blog on wordpress.com because two things:

1. Community support:
instantly you have a group of people your can invite to view your posts without going out to promote at other social sites.

2. Server support: not worrying about breakdowns, bad service from domain providers etc. I have been there. My main site had crashed twice and I had lost all my data once. Had to pick myself all over again. So lesson is, unless you are ready to take a fall, try out the blogging platform available.

If you run your own website, you are practically working on it alone. lf there’s a bug or you installed a plugin that ends up spoiling your dashboard, you have to seek help at the wordpress forum and sometimes, you won’t even know how to begin describing what the problem is! There is a lot of jargons you have to learn. Wordpress.com provides exactly the same dashboard or admin features as those on self-hosted wordpress sites. You may wish to migrate to write on a self-hosted platform in future.

If you have downloaded or used wordpress themes and plugins, you are aware that they do come free of charge and take no time to plug and play. Look here!

Over 6.5 million downloads and 918 themes, that is approximately 7,284 downloads per theme! It still doesn’t explain the frequency of downloads. Yet, I am not sure if wordpress is trying to keep up with the designers or the users.

Whatever the case maybe, I am not going to upgrade just yet as I am still cruising through the brand new suite of Wordpress 2.8.2. For others who are into keeping up with the newest and latest, WordPress 2.8.3 is available! Please update now. Well will you?

Basically, when you set up a wordpress blog like this one, you have to include the necessary elements not only to help your readers to find ways around your website, you also need tools to help you manage your website better. We are reminded that the internet is a gigantic and enormous web, information arrives and gets send off in every way possible and it amazes us how a simple click of a button will result in exactly the kind of information we have been looking for. I shall explain about the wordpress plugins that I have used in a series of posts.

SOCIALABLE PLUGIN

If there is a purpose to life, it is definitely to meet and get to know what other people do around the world. How we do that sometimes require us to travel through time and places to meet these people. Yet there are so many social hangouts that it is impossible for us to be present in many places at any one time. So to spread the word of our message, we need to use social buttons. These allow readers to send your post to the social place of their choice. The one I am using for this blog gives me the option to choose where I want my posts to be if readers where to send them.

Sociable which you can choose to download for free at Yoast.com

If you browse to the end of this post, you will notice a number of coloured (faded) buttons. They will lead you to bookmark or send this post to readers related to the buttons you choose. So if you want to bookmark them in your google account, look for the google button and click on it. If you are interested to send it to twitter, you find the icon ‘t’, click on it and follow the instructions given. Easy and quick.

You do not need to have a website like this one to make a social bookmark. You do, however, need to have an account at the social site to which you want to send the social site.