At the present time, I currently run about five blogs. I do it mostly because I love researching different topics. However, the single most annoying thing that I find myself being forced to deal with almost every single day are spam blog comments. These number from dozens to hundreds depending on the day.
Many bloggers or website owners that have commenting systems have to deal with this dilemma and I’m sure they share the same frustration. It seems that even if you’ve enabled comment moderation, that doesn’t stop spammers from automatically submitting garbage to your comments form. Last week, after spending a full 25 minutes deleting hundreds of spam comments from the moderation area, I decided that I’d had enough.
This is a dilemma that many website owners have to come to terms with. Do you require that commentators register to your site before commenting? That would completely shut down spam, but it would also virtually shut down commenting. Most people simply don’t want to take the time to register.
The only other solution that really works is one that many people are already turning to every day – using Captcha. There are a lot of decent Captcha script packages and plugins out there, but I think the best is one that was briefly noted in the MUO Directory a while back called ReCaptcha.
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When it comes to building a website, it helps to have a process to follow, especially if you are just getting started as a web designer. Good guidelines can help you work better by keeping forgetfulness to a minimum.
Every designer or company will develop unique components to their web design process over time, but the basics remain the same: learn, plan, design, code, launch and maintain.
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Yesterday I received an email from one of our readers, asking on what social media sites he should try to secure his name (which can be either his personal name, or his website/business name, depending on what brand he is trying to promote).
In my opinion there are two that are absolutely a must: Twitter and Facebook. All the others are optional. Depending on the type of business you have some niche social sites might be compulsory too. For instance, if you are a photographer you should try to secure your name/brand on Flickr too.
That being said, if you have time available it could be a good idea to secure your name on as many social sites as possible. This will solidify your brand and enable you to interact with your audience/customers on many different platforms.
There is a web tool that helps with this task. It is called namechk.com.
You just need to put the desired name on the search box and the tool will check whether it’s available on not on around 150 social media sites. You can also use it as a list of the sites where you can go and create a profile, as some of them will also let you place a backlink to your website.
(Via Daily Blog Tips.)
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