There was a period of relative calm that lasted almost six months, but that ended a few weeks ago when the comment spammers descended on my blog. Almost overnight I was dealing with 30–50 spam comments per day. At least 95% of them were stopped by the common spam words blacklist that I maintain in WordPress, but that just puts them in a moderation queue that I have to check periodically. It was getting to be quite an annoyance.

Enter Spam Karma 2.0. This WordPress plugin has stopped my comment spam cold, and it doesn’t even require me to moderate the comments that it traps. It’s intercepted nearly 1,000 comment spams in a little more than a week and hasn’t had a single false positive. Run, don’t walk, to install Spam Karma if you’re using WordPress.

I do workshops about blogging pretty frequently and I always have the participants create their own blogs. I used to encourage people to use Blogger, but there are some limitations to Blogger that quickly become a pain in the rear. Among them are the difficulties with including photos and other media, limited support for tagging posts with Technorati-compatible tags, lack of categories for posts, and no trackback. There are others and most of these aren’t apparent right away, but if you get serious about blogging you’ll run into them before long.

So I suggest you skip Blogger all together and get a free account with a more robust blogging system. There are two great options: James Farmer’s IncSub and Alan November’s November Learning site. Both are free for educators and provide a much more robust environment that will grow with you as you get more adventurous with your blogging.