This weekend I did some minor upgrades to this website. I wrote a captcha class in PHP for my contact form. It was a lot of fun creating it and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out and so far I haven't had any spam through my contact form. I know captchas aren't fool proof but so far it's been a really good stop gap solution. I signed up for del.icio.us, digg, newsvine, blinklist, and magnolia and I found it interesting that most of them used a captcha during the registration process. Along those same lines I added a link so you can bookmark any of my articles that you might find interesting using del.icio.us, digg, newsvine, blinklist, and magnolia.

I've never really received a ton of comment spam, maybe 3 or 4 a day at the most, but it's been enough to be annoying. I made it so that I can block a spammer by their IP address and that has helped but it's not perfect by any means and it's not proactive. So I decided that I would try to do something that is proactive as well. I've noticed that most of the comment spam that I get had common keywords so I decided to add keyword checking. So far since I've added keyword checking I haven't received any comment spam which is nice.

I could use my captcha for blog comments and require that a visitor type in the captcha code before submitting a comment. However, I don't want to do anything that drastic yet. I realize that captchas aren't very accessible to blind people and it can be annoying to type in that code every time you want to leave a comment. So for those reasons I'll hold off on using a captcha for comments.