Day 9: A Quick Observation

I don’t have a significant topic today, and I don’t have a lot of time to write this morning, but as I opened the dashboard for the blog this morning I had a passing thought, and I thought I’d elaborate.  This is a little tip for anyone who runs a blog or who is thinking about starting one.

I have been running blogs for about three years now.  I own three different domains, each of which has had its purpose over time.  Two of these blogs are not active right now, but I keep them up because I may want the domain again and there is some hard work there including videos of workshops and my year of podcasting.

Besides the never-satisfied appetite for new material that nags at me every time I think about it (Little Blog of Horrors), there are other maintenance tasks involved in the care and feeding of a blog.  One that always bugged me was sorting through the comments.  I always set up a blog with comment approval, a person would be crazy not to, so I have to sort through all comments to make sure that they are appropriate and from people who are acting responsibly.  There is a tremendous amount of spam that circulates as comments on blogs.  These are not generated by people, but by automated bots.

Sometimes these are funny.  They are usually designed to sound like they have read your blog, “I have been so impressed by the things that you say and I want to know more.” (at one point I thought about letting these through and basking in praise).  However, they always have a link that would draw a reader to an advertising or even dangerous site, and unless the owner sorts through these daily, they amass in the hundreds.  Since I don’t get many legitimate comments on this blog (pity party) I don’t want to miss any of them, and it’s a pain to sift the wheat from the chaff.

I knew the answer for this, but it took me forever to implement it.  Two weeks ago I added a requirement for identification of responders and completion of a captcha (in this case a simple math problem).  Wordpress had this as a simple plugin, and I’m certain most blogging platform does the same.  Though I know putting in this information might be a little annoying for readers, since I have implemented this step I have had only one non-legitimate comment get through.

So this is a brief explanation of why I’ve added these steps.  I hope the math problems don’t dissuade you because as always, I invite your comments.