So my year has started out much like last year ended. With a lot of restrictions on travel, shopping and going out. With that in mind, I decided to do a quick revisit to some of my websites. Everything is set to automatically update so I wasn’t worried about that. It was more how to make them load faster, and reduce the comment and email spam.

If I get another email from someone wanting to get my website to number 1 in google I think I might scream!

It was easy to fix the comment spam, I just cranked up the comment restrictions. But stopping the spam emails coming through my contact form… well it did take a few more steps. I was going to add a captcha component, but I hate having to use those myself. So, I went down the Akismet plug-in path. It adds an invisible step to the email process that checks the user email address and gets rid of any that are known spammers. I don’t really need several emails a day about google ranking, if I wanted to be number 1, I could pay for adwords. Ranking at #1 isn’t a big deal to me, you just need to be on page 1 of the results. Plus I would rather do it for free than pay some programmer to gank the system to show me at #1.

Not to mention the proposed new media laws here in Australia might just see google search removed from Australia. Not much point in being #1 when there is no search function! 😉