Bells and Whistles You Can Add To Your Blog

There are a ton of add-ons and extras you can add to your blog.  Here are just some of the best ones:

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CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is an image that has letters and/or numbers in it, which people can identify, but spam bots can't detect.  When a comment is left on a post, the letters/numbers in the CAPTCHA must be entered in the order they appear, correctly.  This tells your blogging software that the comment was left by a human and not a spam bot, letting it block the spam, but allow the quality comments through.  There are some variations on the standard CAPTCHA puzzle, including math problems, which users need to solve correctly to post or login.

TrackBacks

Trackbacks are helpful tools that let bloggers link to related content on other blogs.  If your blog is trackback-friendly, you can link to another blog just by using it's URL of the post.  There is also usually an automatic notification that lets your blog notify another blog when the post has been referenced, usually letting the original author create a link to your post.

Trackbacks can, however, be a source of spam and because of this are becoming decreasingly used.  Although they are a nice feature to have, if the software package you are looking at doesn't offer trackbacks, it may not be a negative anymore.

RSS feeds

One of the best features of blogging software is the ability to create an aggregate news feed by using an RSS.  Having a RSS or News Aggregator included in your blog package lets your site pull in news information from other blogs.  You can then provide this additional information to your readers, giving them a diverse variety of content.

Spam Whitelist

Some blogging software packages include an ability to 'whitelist' users, where you can pre-select them for approval in the comments.  These types of systems, however, are slowly being phased out, in favour of spam filtering systems and user accounts.

Spam Blacklist

Many blog packages offer a kind of blacklist protection against spam comments.  Colloquially, this is known as the 'Ban Hammer'.  These blacklists are usually centralized databases of emails, IPs, and URLs used by spammers, which are forbidden from commenting on any post, page,or image on your blog.  Keeping your Blacklist up to date means a lot of spam is stopped before it becomes a problem.

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