Fighting Blog Spam with Akismet

Friday, June 12th, 2009

It’s been about a week and a half since I started this blog and I’m beginning to get spam comments as well as pingbacks from blogs that are just posting the first paragraph of my posts. Since I don’t want to have to moderate each individual comment, especially as the site grows, today I’m going to activate the Akismet spam filtering plugin that comes with Wordpress. The Akisment plugin requires an API key from wordpress.com. As long as you’re not making more than $500/month from your personal blog, you can get an API key for free by signing up for a wordpress.com account.

1. Sign up at wordpress.com

If you don’t already have a wordpress.com account, you’ll need to go sign up. If you do, just skip to step two.

2. Retrieve your API key

Sign in to wordpress.com and click My Account>Edit Profile. Your API key will be listed at the top of the page. Copy the API key, you’ll need it in a minute.

3. Activate Akismet

Login to Wordpress on your website (not wordpress.com) and click Plugins. Find Akisment and click Activate (it’s on the right). You will get a message at the top of the page saying “Akismet is almost ready. You must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work.” Go ahead and click enter your WordPress.com API key.

4. Enter your API key

Enter the API key you copied earlier into the textbox. I also chose to to check the “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month” checkbox as well. I don’t see a point in letting them take up space in the database. Click Update Options and you should get a message saying “Your key has been verified. Happy blogging!”

So… Happy blogging!

Claiming Your Blog on Technorati

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Technorati is an search engine specifically for blogs. It was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. It’s quite a site, and I’m claiming my blog there today. I’ll walk you though it here.

1. Sign up

Go to http://technorati.com/account/signup/ and sign up for a Technorati account.

It’s not too difficult, just follow the instructions and you’ll have your account in no time!

2. Claim your blog

To get to your account settings (where you can claim your blog) click on your username in the top right hand corner next to the sign out link. Then click the Claimed Blogs tab and claim your blog.

Type in the URL of your blog and click begin claim.

Technorati will provide you with a small piece of code to put on your home page. This allows them to verify that the blog you’re claiming really belongs to you. It’s really just a special link back to Technorati. Don’t worry, you won’t have to leave it there forever. Once you’ve posted the code so that it shows up on your home page, go back to Technorati and click Complete Claim. Technorati will search your home page to verify that the link is there. When it finds the link, you will be given the chance to provide a little more information about your blog.

Tell Technorati a little about your blog and click Save Blog Info. Congratulations, you’ve claimed your blog on Technorati!