Let me address two potential objections before they arise: yes, I’ve contacted Dave about this [but admittedly just before writing this post, so he hasn't had any time to respond], and no, I don’t like running Akismet, even though I get how it’s designed to leverage network effects and all that. Man, I just don’t like depending on centralized stuff, and yes, I know that comments get processed on failure. I’ve thought about running Akismet and SK2 as a belt-and-suspenders approach, but honestly, SK2 does such a damn fine job 99% of the time that I don’t feel the need.

I guess the comment spammers weren’t content to ruin trackbacks only, eh?

• Alex King’s 404 Notifier. I snarf the RSS feed, and that reminds me that I have new things to go off and fix. [Guilt is good.]
• Google XML Sitemaps. A lot of the 404s I see are from Google and Yahoo! crawling the site looking for links that once were good. Might as well let the search bots know where things really are, no?
• Redirection, which is the true star of the show. John Godley’s plugin is ridiculously powerful—regular expressions for moving an entire directory elsewhere, 410 reporting for links you’ve purposefully ended, the ability to create 301s on the fly when you change a post slug, you name it. I can’t say enough about the awesomeness of this plugin.

If you’re taking an existing site into WordPress and want to re-point things, or if you’re looking to reorganize your WP site, these tools will help you keep the Web from being broken. That’s a good thing.

Update, 1555 CDT: My apologies to the handful of subscribers of my comment feeds, who’re now seeing the effects of me using the BirdFeeder Pepper for Mint and the BirdFeeder WP plugin.

My apologies to you if you got splogged in this attack as well. There’s not too much that you can do pro-actively about such things, at least that I’m willing to do. [Offering summary-only feeds, copyrighting my work, etc.]

And yes, I know about the ob_gzhandler issue, folks. It’s intermittent, and I haven’t even begun to have the time to debug.

Thanks again, Dr. Dave.

Never forget: comment spam isn’t personal, and it is a money maker for the spammers. That’s their whole motivation.

UPDATE at 15:04:

There are currently 0 comments in moderation

There have been 4877 comment spams caught since the last digest report 1 day ago.

The beautiful thing, though, is that my server is not even batting an eyelash. My load average is consistently <1 [and 4.0 is full utilization on this box].

A happy belated birthday to my sister-in-law, Cindy, whom I did get a call into yesterday on my way to Chattanooga.

The Eric Peters / Andrew Peterson / Andy Gullahorn / Jill Phillips show last night rocked. [I'm probably going to be in trouble with Rick for not telling him about the show when he reads this.] I’m going to see Caedmon’s Call play on Thursday. My body rebels at the thought, but I also think I’ll get back from there before 0300 on Friday morning … unlike last night.

And yes, if you’re thinking that I’m testing the Timezone plugin with this entry, you’re right.

It works!

The rest of me—the part that’s a pragmatist and that really loves WordPress for what it can do, and not what it doesn’t do—loves the idea. Giving end-users flexibility? Awesome. Limiting the amount of time users need to be coding? Great!

First dump should happen at 2300 local tonight. Here goes nothin’! [Oh, and it's thanks to this HOWTO on dumping your del.icio.us links into WordPress, which is missing one key component: in Step 3, you'll find the Experimental section only if you're editing your settings. Well-written HOWTOs are, indeed, hard-to-find---mainly because they're hard-to-do!]

If you use WordPress and want to spend 2-3 hours a day sifting through Technorati searches, etc., you could make yourself one hell of a niche market with a weblog about WordPress. It would eventually be a positive thing for the community, I feel.

I’m throwing that out there because I sure as hell have neither the time nor the desire to take it on.

I will now leave the house, set off the alarm, and forage for food. When I come back, the alarm will be my bitch…

Note that wp_title() has a default separator of » that will trip you up if you don’t know it’s there, and the separator shows up before the post title. [Not good, I say!] If you put make it wp_title(”), though, you won’t have a separator at all. You’ll need to hardcode a separator between wp_title() and bloginfo(), though.

I brought Michael 5% closer to his goal. I hope there are 19 other folks like me who want to homestead the noósphere.