When it comes to socializing on the internet, there are a few basic forms of etiquette (or netiquette, as I like to call it) that should be followed. Respond to emails, respond to IMs if you make your instant messenger information public, and comment on the blogs whose owners comment on your blog.

But if you like to go above and beyond when it comes to reaching out to people who visit your website and comment on your blog, then consider a plugin like Comment Relish. Comment Relish is a quick and easy little WordPress plugin that emails new commenters to your blog with a message of your choosing. The default message can easily be customized to reflect custom text of your choosing.

The Comment Relish plugin is easy to install and easy to use, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to reach out to new commenters on their blog.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Spam is annoying, and there are certainly a lot of WordPress plugins that can help you catch it, moderate it and delete it. Several useful spam catching & killing plugins include Akismet, Bad Behavior and Sparm Karma 2. I have used all of these plugins, and all three are pretty effective in catching legitimate spam comments.

But instead of worrying about catching spam, focus on preventing it. Imagine being able to write about lab coats and not get crappy spam comments! There are several ways to accomplish this, including requiring user registration in order to post comments, common sense and math questions, and some basic captcha (mixture of letters and numbers that are randomly generated) questions. But these can all be bypassed by spammers who use bots to make the rounds on blogs.

So, what can work? Consider using reCAPTCHA. Unlike a typical captcha, reCATCHA works by using scans of digitized books. These scans cannot be read by a computer or spam bot, but they can easily be deciphered by human viewers. Additionally, reCAPTCHA uses two words or groups of words together in one puzzle/question, as a further preventative measure against spam attacks.

reCAPTCHA is put to use by PayPerPost (which is where I first saw it) and many websites that allow user account registrations. Now it’s found in a plugin: WordPress’s very own WP-reCAPTCHA. Installation takes less than five minutes (upload, activate, fill in the API keys which are given to you with a free account registration at recaptcha.net), and the reCAPTCHA box is automatically displayed on a blog entry’s comments page. Additionally, the plugin allows the reCAPTCHA functionality to be used with new user registrations.

You can see WP-reCAPTCHA in use right here.

Bottom line: be proactive, not reactive.

WordPress 2.6.3 has just been released! Read more information at the WordPress blog, or download directly here.

Fixes in this version include:

• security fixes involving a third party program used in the WP Dashboard

CommentLuv is a nice little plugin that enables you to automatically give your commenters a little lovin’. How it works is simple: every single time a visitor leaves a comment on a blog entry of yours, a link to their most recent blog entry is automatically generated and placed beneath their comment. This enables comment loving, as well as “link juice” and the ability to give some traffic back to your commenters.

I use this plugin on all of my blogs, and I love how easy it is to use and how it automatically does the job for you.

Last December I blogged about the WordPress Database Backup plugin.

Tonight it saved my ass (and a lot of time and potential tears and screams of rage).

So a few minutes ago I went to check on in-my-bag.com. Page coming up blank. Strange, but it’s happened before (the chosen theme randomly unchooses itself). So I go to login to the WP dashboard. Password denied. Also strange, but then that has happened before, too. Only this time, the lost password doesn’t go to my email address, because the email address isn’t the one registered on the user account. Whiskey tango foxtrot!?

Anyway, long story short, something got screwed up, somewhere, and even though the jibberish email address was easily swapped out for my real email address, and then I was able to log back in to the WP dashboard, all the posts, comments, links, settings, EVERYTHING… gone. All gone.

But I use the WordPress Database Backup plugin. I have it configured to create a backup my entire WordPress database daily and email that copy to an extra email account of mine.

To get back in business, I just had to download yesterday’s saved database, unzip it, then upload it via phpMyAdmin. Total time spent restoring in-my-bag.com? Eight minutes.

I strongly recommend this plugin!!!

WordPress 2.6.2 has just been released! Read more information at the WordPress blog, or download directly here.

Fixes in this version include:

• SQL security fixes

Also, Caden pointed out that if you are using WordPress 2.X, there is no need for the Last Modified plugin, because WP’s coding can display the last modified date on its own. See the WP codex for details.

The Last Modified plugin for WordPress is a one-step installation plugin that adds the date and time that a page was last modified (edited) to that page. You can see it in action here. A plugin like this is nice because it reminds you and shows others when a page was last accessed and updated. This can be useful for your own records, or for visitors who are looking to see how recent your website content is.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you put it to work by editing your page.php template and add the following code to it, wherever you would like the last modified date to show up:

php mdv_last_modified();

You can change the format of the date by using the variables that are listed on the PHP.net website. Here is how I have mine configured for jenn.nu:

php mdv_last_modified(’F j, Y’);

Last night, another blog of mine was hacked. When I say hacked, I mean that someone or several someones managed to access the home directory of my website, where all file are contained, and delete each and every one of those files. I was foolish enough to not have made backups of the files, but I was smart enough to make weekly backups of what really matters: the database that contained all entries, comments and general settings for the blog. It was annoying to have to re-download WordPress, install it and then configure things with themes, but at least my writing was saved. Saved for two reasons: the hackers didn’t bother to or couldn’t get to the database, and I had backups stored on my computer.

Learn from my mistake: always back up your stuff! Back up manually, or generate backups if your hosting account is with a webhost that uses cPanel, or another type of account management area that generates backups. If you are using WordPress, you can also make use of the WP-Backup plugin to automatically create a copy of your database and email it to you on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. For more information on that plugin, see the following article: WordPress plugin: WP-Backup.

The Maintenance Mode WordPress plugin is a great tool for a blogger who wants to make changes to their website, without those changes being unveiled to visitors. When Maintenance Mode is activated, the blogger continues to see their website in its fully functioning form. Unregistered/users who aren’t logged in, on the other hand, see a page that is something like the “under construction” pages and animated graphics from the early ’00s.

This is what a blog under Maintenance Mode will look like to unregistered users and registered users who aren’t logged in:

WP-Ban is an easy to use WordPress plugin that allows you to easily ban IP address, hosts and even specific referring domains or individual pages from your blog. It works the same way as manually editing your .htaccess file, except that it does the editing for you. It used to be that if you wanted to ban a pesky spammer or annoying drama stirrer from your website, you would have to FTP to your public files, download a copy of the (usually hidden) .htaccess file, add the blocked IP addresses to it, and then re-upload it. Or, login to your hosting account’s cPanel or hosting account management page and ban IP addresses from there.

WP-Ban integrates the banning process right into WordPress, and as mentioned above, adds a few extras. You can ban IP address, or entire ranges of IP addresses. Ban a specific host, or ban a specific referring website. You can also exclude an IP address from being banned — useful if you’re worried you might accidentally ban yourself and have a heck of a time getting back into your website later.

WP-Ban also generates a 403 error page for you, which you can completely customize from the administration page.