Blogging Platforms, Spam and Ease of Use

There was a recent post which made me laugh, What Does Your Blogging Platform Say About Your Personal Brand? It was cruel but funny, like all of the things which seem to make me laugh. Hey, I’d like to be a better person if it didn’t take so much damn work.

The post that you are reading is brought to you courtesy of Blogger, which is currently really pissing me off. Laurel Cremant, author of How to Kill Your Immortal, wrote a wonderful post that I very much wanted to respond to and thank her for (she was a dream to work with, by the way), but every comment I’ve left just disappears into the aether. I haven’t been able to comment on posts on The Salamader’s Quill for a long time. Same thing, everything just disappears without an error message.

I’ve used my share of early, problematic blogging platforms. The very earliest incarnation of this blog used Grey Matter, which saved posts as flat files. I lost almost everything to corrupted data, and then I moved to Livejournal. Hey, at one point most of us had blogs on Livejournal – I had some very good LJ friends whom I miss to this day. Next step was WordPress.com, a huge step up towards having a more open, and more standards-compliant, blog. This blog is self-hosted, using WordPress.

WordPress is the most flexible, feature-rich content platform out there. In my last position at a digital media company we built all non-ecommerce sites in WordPress due to its user-friendliness, standards compliance and clean code, and the wealth of free plugins that exist. I would recommend it to anyone without reservation.

CAPTCHA-guarded comment systems are another thing which really irritates me on blogs, along with the Blogger requirement of posting with credentials to another account. I don’t want to post comments under my ancient LJ or wordpress.com site, thank you very much. Those blogs are still out there, but I don’t want to send any traffic their way. I just want to comment with a minimum of hassle. All it takes is a WordPress site with an Akismet plugin. It’s free, and it works like a champ to block spam comments. I get roughly 30-50 spam comments per day on my blog (oh, if I only got that many real comments!) and Akismet catches almost all of them. Once or twice a month it may let one slip through, and I manually block and delete them. Problem solved.

Keep it easy, and clean, and friendly for everyone. Use WordPress, use Akismet, and put those old, outdated platforms behind us.

EDIT/ADDENDUM:

Some spammers have a sense of irony: “Do you have a spam problem on this website; I also am a blogger, and I was wanting to know your situation; we have developed some nice practices and we are looking to exchange solutions with others, why not shoot me an email if interested.” from Christian Louboutin Miss Clichy 140mm Pumps Red

*sigh*