Testing new poll feature

This morning, I learned about the new feature for adding PollDaddy polls and surveys to our WordPress blogs.

I wrote about it here: Do you want to add polls to your site?

On that blog, however, there seems to be a CSS conflict between the poll and one of the other widgets I’m using on that site.

So, I’m testing the same poll here:

Now, we’ll see how it looks on this blog.

Big changes to this blog today

I was notified that this blog was not in compliance with the WordPress.com terms of service.

I thought I read the TOS when I started this blog and don’t remember any prohibitions against affiliate marketing, but there are, so I deleted all the links and posts that I think did not comply.

I have plenty of other blogs where I can write about whatever I want, so this is not a major problem.

I want to keep this blog, and I hope my actions today will bring it into compliance.

I moved all the affiliate marketing posts to a new blog at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing and I hope you’ll join me there.

In the future, I’ll be posting about non-commercial topics on this blog as my neurons fire randomly.

All the best,

JD

Trackbacks – How to use them?

I’ve used a lot of blogging platforms over the last few years while I was trying to find out which ones I like best and which offer the tools and capabilities I want.

I did a lot of blogging using Blogger, which doesn’t support trackbacks, so I never really understood what they were all about.

So, this morning, I decided it was time to sort this out.

This blog is powered by WordPres version 2, and I have trackback and pingback enabled, so I should be able to point to another blog entry and the trackback should be automatic.

My first reason for trying to understand this was because I wanted to comment on Why Blog Anyway? and I wanted to see if the trackback would work.

Since I didn’t really understand how this works, I did some searching and found an outstanding WordPress Trackback Tutorial that explains much of what I was finding confusing.

I blog on several platforms, as I said, and my main blogs are powered by Userland’s Manilla, Userland’s Radio Userland, and WordPress. As far as I know, the first two do not support automatic trackback pinging, so I think I’ll have to manually enter the trackback URL in the URLs to Ping box when I create the new article.

Once I publish this article, I’ll link to it from John Dilbeck and Friends, using a manual trackback, to see if it works as expected.

I can see that I’ve been missing a powerful tool in communicating with other bloggers. I’ll rectify that today.