I, for one…..HATE spam….

I am not talking about the weird, pulverized meat stuff that comes in a can either.

Internet / Email Spam has become a major hassle for anyone and everyone that has an email address or a website.  Pushing knock-offs of every conceivable product known to man.  Fake purses, watches, NFL/NHL jerseys, shoes, coats and jeans just to name a few.  You can’t seem to escape from it, it is insidiously infiltrating society at an alarming rate.

From late summer to today’s date, my spam filter on this blog has caught 34,720 spam messages.  Persistence is their motto!  But little do they know, I don’t even see their messages…they just head off into a virtual paper recycling wastebasket (I make sure I recycle every scrap of paper, even virtual spam).

All because of a ‘Plugin’. 

Plugin’s are neat little gadgets you ‘plug into’ your site.  They come in a variety of uses, but one in particular is my favourite, it is called ‘Akismet’….and I think it is the next best thing since they invented the chicken that lays sunnyside up eggs…. what? you don’t have one of those yet? Really?  One of the best inventions ever – plop her down on a frying pan and out pops two perfect, sunnyside up eggs…ok, I might be embellishing just a tad…but it isn’t totally out of the realm of possibilities, I can see that happening sometime in the year 3045.

Anyway, Akismet allows me to concentrate on creating and maintaining my site without spending hours and hours and hours deleting SPAM comments.  Ask any new blogger what the most frustrating thing about starting a blog is?  They’ll answer ‘Dealing with SPAM’.  They get caught up in SPAM comments that consumes all of their time and frustrates them with the inability to escape from them….until now.

If I could offer one little piece of advice to anyone contemplating starting a blog or a website on the WordPress format – make getting Akismet your first priority, and it is free too, which is even better.  Mainly because I am cheap..um..’thrifty’, yeah, thrifty…

Now…if I can only get a plugin or program to stop the snail-mail spammers, I would be a totally happy camper…