I’ve gone back to the pre­vi­ous Word­Press theme, which is called Ahimsa.

I’m try­ing out the Twenty Twelve theme that came with the Word­Press 3.5 update.

The Akismet plu­gin, which I use to block com­ment spam here, has a dis­play of how much com­ment spam I’ve received. The amount has been going up ever since I turned com­ment­ing back on, with the total spam for Jan­u­ary being 2,279. That’s more than twice the amount of email spam I received in the same period, despite have had the same email address (widely dis­trib­uted across mul­ti­ple web­sites) for six­teen years. I don’t really see why peo­ple would bother gen­er­at­ing so much com­ment spam–I can’t even remem­ber the last time I saw a spam com­ment get through to somebody’s weblog.

A while back I had to turn off com­ment­ing on my weblog after the anti-spam plu­gin I had been using stopped work­ing with newer Word­Press ver­sions. About a month ago I started using the Akismet plu­gin, which made it pos­si­ble to turn com­ment­ing back on. One of the fea­tures of Akismet is a dis­play of total spam and total real com­ments over time, and accord­ing to that dis­play for the month of July (the first full month that I used it) my weblog received 489 spam com­ments and two real comments.

Over the week­end my weblog, which is han­dled by Word­Press 3.1.3, stopped responding–any attempt to load a page in the weblog or the admin­is­tra­tion panel resulted in a blank page. A bit of Googling turned up that this is a known prob­lem called a “white screen of death” which affects Word­Press and has mul­ti­ple causes. For­tu­nately, I was able to fix it by renam­ing my plu­g­ins folder to “plu­g­in­soff,” at which point I could log into the admin­is­tra­tive inter­face (with all my plu­g­ins dis­abled). After that, chang­ing the name of the folder back to “plu­g­ins” restored every­thing to nor­mal function.

My best guess is that the WPtouch plu­gin, which I had updated shortly before I noticed the prob­lem, either didn’t like being updated or got cor­rupted some­how. I’m not sure I’ll bother with fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion, since the plu­gin is meant to show a nice iPhone/iPod Touch-friendly ver­sion when my weblog is viewed from those devices, and I haven’t really used my iPod for any­thing but lis­ten­ing to music since I bought an iPad.

I finally got around to solv­ing the prob­lem that inter­fered with import­ing the posts from my old Radio User­Land weblog when I switched soft­ware. The import wasn’t perfect–I had to delete a whole bunch of dupli­cates. There are also some for­mat­ting odd­i­ties with the imported posts. Radio didn’t require titles for posts, so all the imported posts now have titles auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated from the first few words of the post’s con­tent, and also block quotes were bro­ken in the orig­i­nal export and came through as “bq” in front of a reg­u­lar para­graph of text.

I’m try­ing out the “tags” fea­ture of Word­Press as an experiment.

I ended up going back to the pre­vi­ous (Mac-like) theme, because the orange theme gave me a headache.

I’m try­ing out a new Word­Press theme, cho­sen because it has the advan­tage of being orange, and there­fore fit­ting bet­ter on a site called “orange-road.com”.

When I switched to Word­Press I left com­ments enabled, and in the (roughly) one month since then I’ve already received 21 spam comments–thus remind­ing me of why I had dis­abled com­ments in Mov­able Type. Rather than dis­able com­ments again, I’m try­ing out reCAPTCHA, a ser­vice which dis­plays two annoy­ingly hard to deci­pher pic­tures of words which much be typed in to post a comment.

Unlike other such ser­vices, the words dis­played by reCAPTCHA are taken from scans of old books that couldn’t be deci­phered by opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion soft­ware. This way at least the effort spent try­ing to fig­ure out what the pic­tures say will at least ben­e­fit peo­ple who scan old books.