I have to say it: this new spam filter, after just one day, has made a tremendous difference in the number of spam posts that have made it through to the spam holding area. If you use WordPress, install Akismet, then go here and install this additional plugin called TanTan. Yes, it takes two plugins, but one seems to work where the other does not. Rather than the more than 100+ spam comments I had been getting in a typical day, I’m down to 3 so far.

I have added one additional weapon in the arsenal against spam here at Patrick’s Place.  It’s an extra plugin that will require comments it deems as “questionable” to be validated with a captcha function.

Captcha is that system that shows distorted letters or numbers and requires a user to type what they see.  But wait…it’s not as bad as you think!! 

It will only require you to do so if it sees something in your comment that it thinks might be spam.  So for those of you who normally comment, you should have no problem at all.  If it does think something is amiss, it’ll give you the additional test, and then your comment should make it to my moderation cue.  And in most cases, I’m fairly quick about moderating comments.

I’ve added this for two reasons:

First, I have discovered recently that some perfectly legitimate comments from perfectly real people were being thrown into the spam filter for reasons that didn’t seem clear to me.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, because I could just click over and scan through the crap and pick out the good ones.

Second, the amount of crap piling up in the spam filter has reached an unmanageable point.   I had to scan through 21 pages of spam comments — more than 1000 individual pieces of spam, with any number of “interesting” references to various body parts, just to salvage 2 legitimate comments.

Sorry, kids…that’s just no fun.

If you leave a comment and it gets flagged and you have to do the captcha thing, I apologize in advance.  I hope that the system will quickly recognize you so that you don’t have to do it a second time.  If you think you’re not getting through, click the Contact tab at the top of the blog and send me a note — that goes just to me, not as a published comment.

Hopefully, this will make sure that you get through quicker and that spambots don’t.

If you’re reading this through a feed reader, then you might want to click the link and come to the actual blog.  I’ve made a switch to a new template, that was fairly close to the previous one, but added some modifications that I like a little better.

In particular, the main content column is a lot wider.  It bothered me that there was so much wasted space on either side of the old template.

The main thing that bothers me about this new template is the weird red weeds that hang down from the header to mark off the start of the sidebar.  There’s another collection of red weeds at the bottom of the sidebar.  I’m not sure what that’s about, but as soon as I find the cyber lawn mower, they’re going to be taken care of.

In any case, I hope you like the modifications.  I’d love to hear your input.

I can be pretty fickle as themes (or templates) go.  I’ve gone through several looks since I first started blogging a few years ago.  I actually don’t want to think about exactly how many looks my different blogs have had over the few short years I’ve been in the blogosphere.

I suppose I’m not 100% happy with the look of this blog at the moment; if I were, it wouldn’t occur to me to mention it.

But I’m curious about your impressions:  what do you like about this layout and what do you not care for?  What would you like to see change?  What would you like to see added?  What could disappear (besides me) and make you happy?  Good and/or bad, here’s your chance to critique the layout.

I won’t necessarily make a change, and can’t promise I’ll adjust exactly as you suggest, but I’d like to know what’s on your mind.

I must apologize to my regular players of the Saturday Six for posting so late. No one was more surprised than I was!

What happened was this: I pre-posted this week’s questions. Now that I am using WordPress as the blog platform for this new version of Patrick’s Place, I can post an entry here and set the date some time in the future and have the post not actually appear until that time. Blogger, as I recall, would display the post immediately but with the future date, and I don’t think AOL even gave you such an option.

In any case, I set the date to the 28th instead of the 27th.

I guess I better make sure that I didn’t set the Sunday Seven to post on the 29th.