Dan has been ahead of me for a while and talked about Word Press, and set up some other sites using this (free) product. Word Press has a lot more flexibility than Blogger, and has features that Blogger doesn't, although I am not complaining, because Blogger is free and works just fine for most blog purposes. You can also see continued improvements with Blogger, such as their ability to upload pictures (started with a "hello" system and then was embedded), and then video, which is now more and more linked with You Tube. Of course the biggest advantage for most people about Blogger (not us) is that Google makes it easy to put ads on the site - now when you go to the Blogger dashboard there is a section called "monetize" which makes it simple to put ads on the side of your blog, and Google / Blogger handle all the details of getting your earnings (such as they are) back to you.
Probably if we were starting this whole thing up today we'd just put it up on a Word Press site, but we have no plans to move everything over, unless Google starts getting unreliable again (it used to fall over and lose posts a lot, but this is extremely rare now). We do get a LOT of our hits through Google queries, almost as often as through images as word queries, which is very surprising, but probably shouldn't be. I read somewhere that the amount of searches on You Tube is getting to be not too far off from searches through traditional search engines, which was not what I expected but then again I am not a kid.
As soon as I talked about putting up a Word Press site over for "Trust Funds for Kids" Dan said I needed to set up Akismet, the Word Press spam system. I didn't really think it would be a big deal but figured I'd do what Dan says since he had a lot more recent and extensive experience on this than I did. And BOY was he right. According to their site:
13 million spam comments caught TODAY
83% of all comments are spam
I really was surprised how many spam comments I received over at that site - there were hundreds of them. The comments would be nice, general comments like "I liked what I saw at this post" but then the link back would be to some site that just had tons of posts cribbed from other sites, full of ads, plus dubious work at home schemes. It was really sad.
The big problem now is that the barriers to entry are so low that people set up sites for nothing, steal content, and then just spam away. Thankfully there are servies like Akismet and Blogger, who must deal with TONS of spam comments, else we'd just be overwhelmed.
3 comments:
Thank god for Askimet, whoever wrote that program should be knighted. I would bet that Blogger uses some form of it to snatch spam before it hits good ol' LITGM, even though we still have some come through.
They must use something else we'd be overwhelmed if 80% of damn comments are spam
My last blog hosting company and I had a falling out over spam. They kept shutting down the utility that allowed readers to leave comments, but wouldn't bother to tell me about it. I have no idea why they were complaining, since I was only getting about 300 spam comments a day at the time.
So why didn't I install some sort of filtering software? Because I had paid them to do it. Either they didn't know how, even though they were glad to take my twenty bucks, or just didn't bother.
Oddly enough, after moving to a new host who was happy to install the anti-spam software for free, I was sort of disappointed to find out how many of my regular daily visitors were spambots. Caused a big hit in my traffic stats.
You guys are bloggers yourselves, so I;m sure you understand.
James
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