WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

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 ...