This blog doesn’t get a ton of traffic. At least not from actual people. It does, however, get it’s fair share of spam. Here is a shot from my Akismet stats showing what has been caught so far.

Impressive, no? 100% accuracy so far. Nothing flagged as spam that was an actual comment, and no spam has gotten through. I never worry about Spam comments, and only delete the spam comments that Akismet has captured once every week or so.

The other great feature of Akismet is that it is invisible to actual blog readers. No need for a captcha, or complex signup procedure in order to leave a comment. Actual comments go in one box for review and approval, spam goes in another for deletion. It couldn’t be simpler.

If you are running a Wordpress blog and haven’t installed Akismet. Do it now.

I’m not a designer, nor a web programmer by trade or training, so when I initially started this blog I knew that I would be using a theme that someone else built. Initially I started with Pink and Yellow media’s Typograph theme.

This is a really nice theme, entirely made up of CSS elements and typographical elements. I liked it, but it didn’t work as well in Internet Explorer as I wanted it to, so I kept looking.

The next theme I tried (currently in use as of this posting) was Allan Cole’s Neutica, also a simple, typograph-driven design. After some tweaking to suit my needs, I was fairly happy with it. It works well in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and is easy to understand and customize for someone with very limited CSS experience.

The good thing about both of these themes is that they really helped me understand what I want, what features of Wordpress I want to take advantage of and what features I don’t care as much about. The problem with both of these themes is the same. They aren’t mine. They don’t really represent me or my limited design sensibility in any significant way. In order for me to fully own this blog, I need to design my own theme. I expect to produce a few failures along the way, and take some elements that work from these two themes, and others that I find along the way.

Luckily, I have a graphic designer in house who can tell me when I am doing something truly horrifying. And worst case, I can draw upon the Fine Arts degree that I pursued during college studies, then abandoned like an article of clothing upon graduation. With these tools, and google serving as an unpaid consultant, I should be able to come up with something.