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Archive for January, 2010

Ever build a website and you got no traffic, but build a blog and suddenly you’ve got a torrent of spam comments? 

Come hell or high water your blog will be found by spammers and it will be on the most obscure places like the About page.  However, it’s not really human visitors.  Keep reading.

I’d get a lot of nonsense spam from Russia and China with nothing but ??????? question marks in all the fields or other jibber-jabber.  I did a little poking around and I’ve come to the conclusion that the likely source is from some type of bot or automated program used to post comments.  Back to that in a minute. 

Using the Askimet Plug-In

The default installation of WordPress comes with a plugin to control spam.  It’s called Automattic Kismet, Akismet for short.  You can activate the Askimet plug-in the WordPress dashboard.  I’ve used it, but it doesn’t stop spam.  It just redirects it to the Spam folder and then you have to deal with it in there.  However, you can set it to delete spam comments after ‘x’ number of days.  It’s pretty good at catching spammy messages, but it will also capture a few legitimate ones, too.   

Using a CAPTCHA Plug-In

There are many different CAPTCHA plugins available.  I use SI CAPTCHA and it’s stopped the comment bots dead in their tracks. 

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

While a CAPTCHA plugin will eliminate the bots, you still have to put up with stoooopid commenters.  Akismet will probably catch most of them, but like I said, they just get redirected to the Spam folder.

WP Captcha Free

I you don’t want to bother your visitors with CAPTCHA codes, there is a plugin called wp-captcha-free.  I really like that one.  I’ve begun replacing the ones that use codes with it and I have not had any problems. 

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Should you host your own blog or use a free blog service like Blogger.com or WordPress.com?  Free does have the advantage of being, well, free, but there are some limitations on using free blogs, especially when it comes to commercial purposes and blog customization.  You could spend endless hours, months, and years building up an entire business on a free blog only to wake up one day and it’s gone.  Good luck trying to get a reason out of support, provided they give support on free blogs.

Free blogs are pretty good for learning how to run a blog.  In my humble opinion, I suggest going with WordPress.com if you’re new to blogging and want to get your feet wet. 

Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, has a horrible editor. 

1. It has no spell checker.
2. It inserts extra blank lines between paragraphs when you go back in to edit a post.
3. It has neither Paste From Text nor Past From Word function so if you paste from something that had formatting in it, it brings the formatting with it.   
4. It has no in-dent/out-dent so if you want to indent more deeply on bulleted items, you can’t. 

I would expect more out of Google, but apparently they don’t care.  I pull my hair out every time I try to use Blogger.

Best advice?  Don’t  use a free blog service for commercial purposes.

Features	Free Blog Services	Privately Hosted Blogs
Price of blogging software	Free	Free
Theme selection	Limited	Exhaustive
Commercial content	WordPress.com prohibits: "... commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites..." Blogger allows: Amazon	Allowed
Advertising	WordPress.com: Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not permitted on WordPress.com blogs. Blogger.com: Allows AdSense.	Allowed
Removal	Can delete your blog without warning or reason regardless of content. You don't own the blog, they do.	Not unless you REALLY screwed up by posting illegal content violating the hosting company's terms of service.
Number of blogs allowed	Unlimited	Unlimited
Use 3rd party plug-ins	No	Yes
Insert custom HTML or Javascript	WordPress: No, they'll strip it out. Blogger: Yes, with a widget.	Yes

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