Poco

Well, the new site is up – but it isn’t fully customized yet. The good thing is WordPress is good about respecting past content. With the exception of some small issues I still have to address for the width of the columns and my link lists, everything is working as it should.

The banner will be back—it takes time to be sure, but the loss of a TON of spam from all sorts of miscreants makes it a welcome relief. I am using the Grass Template but I am not into all the green—so it is getting a face lift via Photoshop.

So little by little, things are getting settled. —>

The

I suppose it was bound to happen – when you plug one hole, spammers find another. I have been receiving trackback spam for a couple of days now. At this point it is only a trickle, but I’ve seen other journals where it turned very quickly into a flood.

If you don’t know, there is a feature in most journal systems were posts and comments on one weblog can be sent as reference comments. It allows interesting conversations sometimes. In any case, it isn’t often that I get real trackbacks or pingbacks (another form of the same thing more or less) so for now, they are all being sent to moderation which means they will wait until I have time to approve them.

I also turned on no-follow so any spam that does get through won’t get any advantage by doing it. The search engines won’t follow the links in comments and won’t give the poster any higher ranking… —>

Comments

Although this WordPress version of my journal has been up for almost a month now, it was only this week that I have started to take the time to work on bringing it up what I would like.

WordPress has a number of options (!) and among them are ways to prevent comments from being taken over by spammers in much the same way email has. I have the most basic method turned on – moderated comments. That means that comments don’t appear until I review and approve them. So, if you make a comment here and don’t see it right away, that is the reason. I wasn’t surprised when I was checking comments today that there were about six spam messages – I was surprised to find some real comments.

Moderation isn’t an optimal solution, but I got so tired of the problem on MovableType – it was one of the reasons I left it. Now however there seems to be some hope on the horizon. eWeek has an article that says Google, Microsoft, Six-Apart, and Yahoo are joining together to offer a solution. Look for me to be one of the adopters soon!

The original Google Blog article and the supporters who have signed on (including the leaders of the WordPress developer group) is here. It isn’t a “change the world in a minute” solution, but it will help. —>