Since the creation of this blog I have had the ever useful Akismet plugin enabled. Akismet, for those who don’t know, is a WordPress Plugin that attempts to recognise and detect spam. Once the spam is detected, it is moved in to a special spam folder, which I periodically check for false positives and then purge.

My current Akismet stats are as follows:
111 spams caught, 0 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 100.000%.

Date             Spam Count
2010-02            4
2010-03          10
2010-04            9
2010-05          87

It generally only takes a few minutes to sort through all of the spam, however, I can see a bit of a trend is occurring and personally, I’d like to stop it before it escalates any further. It is for this reason, I have decided to add another layer of protection. Enter WP-reCaptcha.

WP-reCaptcha is a powerful plugin that takes advantage of reCaptcha to prevent spammers from posting on your WordPress blog. It has many different settings to allow you to customise many aspects of its appearance and behaviour. In this particular instance, I have decided to only enable its most basic functions:

1. Require “Anonymous” users to fill out a captcha when they attempt to post.
2. Require all new registrations to fill out a captcha when they are registering.

The effect of this will be all automated spam bots will be blocked from posting anything and human spammers will (hopefully) be filtered by Aksimet.

This means less time sorting spam and more time doing what I want to do.

After about two months, I have finally gotten around to finding some suitable blogging software and successfully installed it. I must say that I was impressed by the ease of installation, I expected it to be much harder and require a lot of manual text file editing.

As you have probably already realised, the software that I am using is WordPress. I chose WordPress for several reasons, including its price (free), popularity, simplicity and ease of use and set up and that it allows you to install it under your own server/domain.

Originally I was considering writing the software myself, however my PHP knowledge and general HTML knowledge is mediocre at best and I really don’t have the time to be fiddling around with the planning, debugging and beautifying of what would probably turn out to be a nasty looking blog that wouldn’t have all of the functionality of a common place blogging software.

So far I am very happy with the way WordPress is performing and hope to add some new content very soon.