The Hobby Webmaster Blog

It appears that the spam count will cross 20,000 within minutes. Luckily, the software is catching most of them without bothering me. Go WordPress!!

This blog has become my personal champion for attracting comment spam. Luckily the software takes care of most of them. There must be comment spamming software in existence. It would be nearly physically impossible for individuals to produce the volume of spam comments that I see here. At this writing there are over 10,250 attempts at comment spamming this blog. This is running at a rate of about 2000 attempts a day on this one blog. Most of these come without any visitors to the blog. That means that the software in use goes directly to the comment page rather than entering through the front door.

I recently took a wiki offline because of comment spam. I suspect that there is a setting in the software to alleviate the problem, but I have not yet checked for it. If I do not find the setting I will have to check for other wiki software or take an other approach to building the knowledge base that I hope for.

I have just updated several blogs using the new built-in update procedure in WordPress 2.7. This is a very simple process if you are not using either of the themes that come with the WordPress package, or if you have made no modifications to the original files. My first two blogs that I put up were using the default theme, and I had made  some personalization’s to them. When WordPress does an update they replace all the files in the themes that are included with the software.

For all my later blogs I had gone to a free third party theme. This theme makes it easy to maintain my site background and looks. WordPress does not mess with those files, so it is just a matter of one quick click from within the admin area of the blog and the update is accomplished. I went ahead and added the third party theme to the earlier blogs so that future updates will be more straight forward.

Work has been interfering with my web play time, and it is only going to get more in the way for the near future. I do and will have things to post to the AudioArtSound blog though. I did write an article for my site Selling on Your WebSite this evening. The article is titled ‘Traffic is not Enough!‘ It talks a bit about the importance of targeting the traffic that you draw to your website. The title is a link to the article, if you are interested.

While I was paying attention to that site I also did some minor updates to reflect my most recent site configurations. I had brought the site up to spec last month, but as I go I think of some small things and learn some new tricks. I took care of some back office tasks, tweaking the code and css, and made minor cosmetic changes. I have been adding my navbar background to the left nav box recently, color coding all the nav areas the same. I have also been putting a background in my right column ad box because I use both 12o and 160 pixel skyscraper banners there with a frame. The narrow banners look better, I think, with a background color to fill the frame.