I should be flattered in a way, but this blog now has a high enough search engine rating to catch the “eyes” of spambots. So over the last few days, I have had to clear out about 10 spam comments from the queue every day or two. Since I have better things to do, I needed to add an anti-spam plugin to WordPress.
Of course, the good ones are written for WordPress 2.0, so I was forced to upgrade from 1.5.2 to 2.0. I needed to do it anyway, and updating web scripts is now second nature for me. The anti-spam plugin I am using is Spam Karma 2.2 , which installed easy as pie.
Words of wisdom for any newbies out there: before updating your website, do these two things first. (1) Backup your entire web directory (I download mine using an FTP client to my local hard drive) and (2) Backup your MySQL database (I use phpMyAdmin to export and gzip the db tables to my local HD).
If your host provides cpanel and Fantastico access, Fantastico will automatically backup and gzip the site if you use it to upgrade WordPress (or whatever).
The link to Anthonares isn’t working. It is currently http://anthonares.net/index.html (I think, something like that). When I removed the “index.html” it worked.