For the most part, I was getting the occasional spammer who actually took the time to write manual spam into the form (why, I’m not sure — since manually entering spam would only reach me, and doesn’t manually sending each spam message kind of defeat the purpose of spam), but for the most part, my inbox stayed relatively clean.

For the past month however, my comment form has been hit with more automated spam — not a ridiculous amount, but just enough to be annoying. On most days, I would get at least three or four spam message with gibberish subject lines which I needed to delete.

Time to switch to a contact form that protects me from that kind of automated spam. I tried a bunch of them out, but all of them were either too complicated to install (which means I was too tired/lazy to actually follow the steps in the instructions) or didn’t include the really basic spam protection I was looking for.

That’s when I stumbled upon Enhanced WordPress Contact Form, which does exactly what I need and really nothing more. While I wasn’t overly impressed with the way it looked, I simple wrapped some HTML tags around some of the fields in the admin panel and that fixed things up nicely.

Just in case there’s anyone else out there who is experiencing the same kind of issue with contact form spam, I would suggest checking out this great, simple spam-fighting WordPress plugin.

The addition of one-click upgrades to both the WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins was a brilliant feature addition, but I’m hoping things will go one step further and just update my stuff automatically. While I could see the questions raised already (what if something broke? what if you didn’t want to upgrade? what if your database imploded?), why not just make it a feature that you could turn on?

For me anyway, having to log into all of my sites and upgrade WordPress and all its plugins is something that I do irregularly because it’s time-consuming. Would there not be some way to just have WordPress go through the upgrade and just let me know if there’s a problem? I guess we’re still a long ways away from software that can diagnose its own illnesses. Oh well, I can hope, can’t I?

Worry about your content first, delivery mechanisms later. Your first job, no matter what type of content you’re creating, is to consistently deliver quality content. The delivery mechanisms for content are not too hard to figure out, and should largely depend on your audience and the type of content you are creating.

I like to write blog posts because I write infrequently, and when I do write, I like to put down a series of thoughts (it’s not always something long, but it’s too much to fit on Twitter). In my opinion, too much focus is put on the immediacy of microblogging — when instead you should be thinking about whether Twitter is the appropriate forum for your message.

And you can’t really get around the content quality issue. If you’re not creating stuff that people care about, there’s really not much point in creating it, no matter what mechanism you use to deliver that content.

Why does this happen? Why don’t people want to read a particular blog? Well, I’d suggest there are certain things people want to see in a corporate blog. They want a blog that is:

1. Authentic. Many corporate blogs start off on the wrong foot right away by forfeiting their readers’ trust. Instead of a blog written by an interesting, charismatic person in the organization, the job gets unloaded on some poor writer or administrative assistant who has to try to come up with content.

If the voice of the blog feels out of sync with the person who’s writing it, readers will catch on. If the blogger doesn’t have time to write their own blog, they shouldn’t be blogging. Period.

If there’s someone in the organization who is very interesting and charismatic, but just doesn’t have time to blog, consider creating a blog for someone on their team. Chances are, someone who has access to someone interesting and charismatic will usually have some juicy stuff to write about.

Also be wary of what your bloggers write about. A blog that only touts how great the company is is just a waste of time — deal with real issues (including the tough ones).

2. Accessible. Users need multiple ways to access a blog. Throwing a blog onto your corporate intranet may seem like the simplest thing to do, but then again, who’s going to bookmark and religiously visit that page?

If you haven’t already explored an in-house RSS reader, you should. Chances are there are many people in the organization who are already using RSS — find out what they’re using and how it works for them.

Consider blogs and feeds as interdependent. While one can exist without the other, it certainly makes things easier if you have both — otherwise you have a delivery mechanism with no content (that has been created internally), or content with no delivery mechanism.

And whatever you do, don’t punish the people who have been innovative enough to try out RSS on their own. If the organization is committed to knowledge management, punishing the innovators definitely sends the wrong message.

3. Interactive. Much like the authenticity of a blog, you need to have a blogger who’s willing to interact in discussions with people leaving comments.

Comments don’t have to be paragraphs long, but at least take the time to acknowledge people’s comments. This is especially important if the blog is written by a ‘higher-up’ in the organization. You don’t want everyone else to feel ignored when they’ve taken the time to comment on an issue.

Again, if the blogger doesn’t have time to respond to comments, then they shouldn’t be writing a blog in the first place.

Not to pick on anyone, but Matt Heaton’s (CEO of BlueHost, my web hosting company) blog is a great example of someone who doesn’t respond to comments — and I sometimes wonder if his blog does the company more harm than good.

It’s not that Matt’s blog is a bad thing: it’s just that not responding to your customers’ comments could be perceived as showing a lack of interest in those customers’ opinions.

To end on a positive note, corporate blogging opens up all kinds of new opportunities and challenges. Try sticking to these three guidelines, and things should go a bit smoother for you.

And remember, these guidelines don’t get you around the fact that you need great, frequently-updated content in order to attract a crowd. But I’ll leave that up to you.

While browsing around to find out about what happens at 20 months old (yes, I know a blog is not a child, but hey, I thought it might be worth a laugh), I was stunned to come across this statement:

Look for new signs of assertiveness from your toddler. Hallmark behaviors to watch for: He may insist on doing exactly what you’ve told him not to do or throw himself down on the floor in a fit of temper if he doesn’t get his way. His demands may alternately frustrate and amuse you. At times, for example, he’ll likely ask for something that he doesn’t even want, just to see if he has enough power to get it.

Unfortunately, this pretty much describes my nearly 2 year old WordPress install just as well. Last week’s denial-of-service attack on my host’s server didn’t help matters any either.

For example, in the past month, deleting or approving comments would occassionally just break — which started out being kind of frustrating, but quickly turned into a somewhat-amusing “I-wonder-if-it-will-work-this-time” kind of experience.

While upgrading to the latest version of WordPress has certainly helped, I still notice a big difference in the performance of any new WordPress installs versus ones I’ve had to upgrade. This may on the surface sound like a gripe against WordPress, but I think it’s more of a general statement about any technology tool that you’ve had around for a while — it just starts to get old.

Not to mention the fact that I’ve made various customizations/edits/errors with this install, which certainly doesn’t help either. But I have noticed that this particular install has started to develop its own personality (and it’s kind of bad-tempered).

Much like a 20 month-old, when it doesn’t want to do something, there’s really not much I can do but wait it out. While WordPress is throwing a temper tantrum, I usually amuse/distract myself with other things, waiting for it to tire itself out.

I don’t know if my WordPress install is just growing up into kind of a jerk, or if it’s just learning how to be assertive. Maybe a bit of both.

While I don’t really care too much about PageRank, I still find it odd that a redirect had dropped my PageRank to 0. Since I wrote that initial post though, I did a few experiments with my search results, and noticed that none of my Google results had changed at all.

What this seems to indicate to me is that PageRank can only be interpreted over the long term. Looking at the number even over the course of a few months seems to be pointless, since it doesn’t really give you an accurate picture of how Google treats your site or pages.

A while ago, I had decided to go with a challenge question as well as Bad Behaviour (which are both ways to block comment spam before it even happens). Unfortunately, however, Bad Behaviour slowed down the admin of this site to a crawl, so I had to dump it.

As for the challenge question, I didn’t notice any decrease in spam at all. While I didn’t exactly do any before-and-after quantitative analysis on the effects of the challenge question, I have noticed that most of my spam is of the automated bot type — not some spammer sitting there typing in long comments about shady online pharmacies.

So my conclusion would be this: challenge questions aren’t really an effective way to fight spam (at least not in my case). Has anyone else had a different experience with the spam they get or the tools they use to fight them? With all that spam out there, it makes you wonder how much more we can really handle.

This site has hovered around 400 RSS subscribers for months now, which is to be expected I think, since I have sometimes had less time to post than I would like in the past several months. But in the past two months, my subscriber count was suddenly cut in half.

That’s right. One day I logged into FeedBurner, and there were now roughly 200 subscribers instead of 400. I chalked it up to something weird happening on FeedBurner’s end, and didn’t think much about it (I’m not as obsessed as I used to be with subscriber count, fortunately).

A month later, I logged in again, and found the subscriber count had stayed the same for the entire month: approximately 200. Had FeedBurner overestimated my subscriber count before? I had no way of knowing, but assumed that was the case.

I began to accept the fact that something had been miscalculated somewhere, and that I actually had 200 subscribers instead of 400. Strange, but not the end of the world.

So imagine my surprise when I logged in today and saw this (that number in the top right is 398, in case it’s looking a little squished for you like it does for me):

It would appear that I suddenly had 400 subscribers again, after months of having 200. So I clicked on the detailed listing of feed readers and aggregators to see where the other 200 had come from.

According to the FeedBurner stats, 164 Netvibes subscribers (apparently, 41% of my subscriber base) suddenly reappeared on the FeedBurner radar.

So my question is: what happened during those few months that Netvibes’ readers disappeared from my subscriber count? If anyone is subscribed to this site through Netvibes, have you noticed anything weird going on in the past 12 weeks?

Has anyone else had issues with FeedBurner stats being unreliable?

Why? Well, my logic kind of goes like this. If you have a bunch of full posts on the front page, it’s going to be very, very long to scroll down, even if there are only five or six posts on a page. The advantage, however, would be that you don’t have to actually click on an item to see the full post.

So I thought I’d ask you. Would you rather see the full post on the front page? Or would you rather have it abbreviated with ‘More’ and then click on it? Or, perhaps, you read through an RSS reader and don’t really care what’s on the front page. It would be great to get some feedback, whatever it is.

Part of the reason for me asking this question is that I’m trying to reconcile how site statistics reflect the opinions of the site’s users (or, how they don’t).

If I just look at the stats, it would seem that people coming to this site are generally divided into two nearly-equal groups: those who find the site through a search, and regular RSS readers. Logic would then dictate that it wouldn’t really matter whether posts on the front page were abbreviated or not, since very few users actually access the site through the front page.

Yet I think statistics can sometimes be misleading, and still believe that site users usually have a preference, even if it’s not reflected in the stats. I’d be very interested to hear some opinions.

And yes, I’m using a ‘More’ tag for this post.