Akismet : Getting rid of blog spam

Caught this over on techcrunch.

I actually had the akismet wordpress plugin installed for a long time but hadn’t gotten around to enabling it until now. I forgot I had a wordpress.com account and it needs a wordpress.com API key to function.

Either way, it’s active now and right away caught 30 comment spams. I’ve got ~3600 comments awaiting moderation right now and I suspect that ~99% of them are spam. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even care to wade through the mess and manually moderate.

By all accounts Akismet works wonders. Provided you don’t make a lot of money off your blog, it’s completely free to use and dead simple to install. System-wide statistics are available here. 53,932 approved messages today, 1,370,133 rejected spam messages today.

Simple OpenID

Sam Ruby has a good overview of OpenID (wikipedia) and the steps required to start identifying yourself. I personally don’t know much about it but I’m intrigued to learn more after reading some of the recent press about it.

OpenID For Non-Superusers

OpenID Screencast

I’ve claimed my identity and this blog on technorati using it’s OpenID interface. Everything worked rather seamlessly. Tomorrow I’ll install the WordPress plugin that will authorize comments via the protocol. I suspect it’ll work as expected.

Decentralization is nice, there’s no reason you can’t install something like phpMyID and host your identity on a server of your choosing instead of storing it centrally (on a site like myopenid.com). I’ve yet to do it myself but Sam’s instructions are simple enough.

OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption amongst large sites, with organizations like Technorati both acting as a Relying Party and as a Provider as well as Wikipedia announcing that they will support OpenID

Have fun!

Competing Wii Comments

From toysrus.com

• Great system. Very entertaining. Low learning curve. Virtual console has some good classic games.
• This is an okay system. First of all, it is very hard to use, and especially hard to get used too, especially if you have been using a classic shape controller beforehand. The graphics are okay, but what could you expect from a cheap system. The games are incredible, especially zleda twighlight princess, but the controls are close to impossible. Its very annoying to use the add on nunchuk controller, which makes moving easier but is still very difficult.
• This is a great console! It is the best on the market that can work for the whole family!
• This system is awesome it might be a lot of money but who cares it is really fun!!!
• This is okay although other systems are better.
• It’s great although I wish it had high definition.

Pretty humorous. Absolute love and hatred towards the console. I don’t own one yet but I’m still considering getting one once they’re more widely available (meaning I can walk into Futureshop and buy one).