Upgrade
I’ve just upgraded my files to the latest WordPress which was suprisingly painless. Backup everything, install and go.
I have also condensed the layout a little bit by making certain fonts a little bit smaller, and the spacing between lines tighter. I have long thought the blog looked a bit messy, especially long posts, and I didn’t like the fact that you had to scroll quite far to see the entire sidebar. Now I think it’s much better and less cluttered.
I have also added a Captcha module to the comments. This means that in order to submit a comment on the blog, you need to take a look at a slightly garbled image and type in the text exactly as it is displayed in the little textbox below it. That’s it. It’s a little annoying, but certainly not complicated, and a necessary evil to block out spam and still allow for anonymous comments. I have other measures to block spam, but I am a bit tired of wading through 20 or so spam comments that get caught in the filters. I have to review the caught spam since I don’t want valid comments to be unjustly blocked. Adding this image verification part is a good first line of defense to make sure that you are a human and not a robot.
But please, remember to make a copy of your comment before submitting, in case you accidentally type in the incorrect captcha code. This is really easy, and something you should make sure to remember to do everywhere on the web when you submit longer texts. This will save you a lot of time and frustration as you don’t have to rewrite everything again just because of a technical error or something.
This is how I do;
When done writing and with the cursor still in the text box, I hit CTRL+A (this selects all the stuff I’ve just written) and then CTRL+C (this copies the selected text to the clipboard). This way, when I hit submit and there is an error, I can simply go back to the commenting page and paste my comment into the comment box and try submitting again if needed.
If you are a user of anything other than Windows, you might need to do it in another way, but then again – if you are using something other than Windows you should probably already know how.
