Akismet, my new hero.

I finally got around to paying more attention to my blog. Updating the resume…adding a post or two…proofreading others to make corrections…looking into some new plugins for WordPress….etc.

One of the most annoying things to deal with was the comment spam. In three months I had accumulated 15,000 pieces of it. There’s only about 2,000 people who have actually visited my blog thus far. Ever. (Thanks, Google Analytics!) But, since I’m really not on here all that often (something I’m trying to improve on…) I really hadn’t paid attention to the spam. I have all comments require moderation, so they weren’t flooding my site- I just have to go on every couple of months, glance through the posted commented on to see if there are any real comments (there aren’t) and run a SQL command to manually clear the crap.

I would like to know if there are any actual comments in the future, and see if anyone has anything useful to say, or even a useless comment, but one that was made by an actual person instead of a bot quoting random sentences from random books in an attempt to look Turing-complete. Thus, I configured Akismet this evening, and it’s already flagged crap as spam and shuffled it off to the spam folder, which is much easier to empty- no SQL commands into the void.

So long story short, and I’m sure old news to the vast majority of bloggers, Akismet makes me smile just a little more than I was yesterday. Thanks, devs!