Unplugged

Relicnews has a WordPress backend, and because comments are enabled and you don’t need to register an account to comment, we have an intermittent spam problem.

Most of my time at the moment is spent updating this site, working towards my degree, and developing new sites to help pay the bills (not necessarily in that order). I don’t have a lot of free time to spend messing around with different anti-spam solutions, so until now I’ve just let the default spam words list catch unwanted comments. However, when I saw Akismet had been launched, I thought I’d give it a go. The stuff Matt’s been behind—WordPress, mainly—hasn’t let me down yet, which gave it a bit more credibility than the usual run of plugins and the like. More importantly, it seemed simple to implement, and the numbers looked good.

There was just one catch: I needed a WordPress.com account. A golden ticket arrived in my email inbox a couple of weeks ago, but since I already had a blog, I gave it to my brother (a better and funnier man than I, if somewhat more lazy). No account meant no API key, which meant Akismet wouldn’t work.

I suppose I could have asked him for his key, but he might need it himself at some point. No, what I needed was my own WordPress.com account, so I toddled over to the site to submit a different email address, in hopes of getting a new ticket. And, of course, the site was broken—the front page displayed fine, but trying to anywhere just gave me database connection errors.

That was last night; this morning brought more luck. Specifically, the Flock download, which (once installed) gave me the chance to create a WordPress.com account then and there. Victory!

(A quick note on Flock: it’s just a skinned Firefox, with a couple of blogging and social bookmarking plugins. Still, it’s easy on the eye and hasn’t crashed yet, so I’m trying it out; Eric’s made it his default Windows browser, which is a recommendation of sorts.)

My intention was simply to make the blog, grab the key, and get the hell out of Dodge, but in the end I couldn’t do it; empty textareas call to me with a kind of siren song. The resulting posts are a bit abrasive and less thought out than usual, but some people appear to like that. So, if you want to read me ranting about foolish expectations or the word ‘blog’, head on over to ‘My Own Private Riot’. I suppose we could subtitle it ionfish unplugged.