As I found out the hard way captchas are a must for sites that allow anonymous users to post comments to blog. Spammers have gotten pretty smart and can easily defeat simple methods of preventing spam as I had implemented previously. Previously I have simply asked the user to enter "5+5" into one of the form fields. Spammers did not take long to script for this simple check and next thing I know I got 500 comment that where links to some link farm. Hopefully with the new captcha mechanism I implemented and the fact that there is an extra step in the form submission this is the last of this type of spam that I am going to see.

I restarted development on the php blog that runs this site. I realize that WordPress is pretty bad under the hood. So far I have lots of cool ideas for the directions to take the project into. In the immediate future I need to at least implement the basic features that most people would expect. After that I can start to developing my new ideas for better ways to blog.