Site notes

At some point, I really must get round to designing this weblog. There is some interesting information about using stylesheets on an MT blog here:

http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/06/30/mary-janes-and-site-design/

I like the idea of being able to choose your preferred style, particularly if the site uses a cookie to remember the style you chose for next time you visit.

But right now, I need to find out how to delete all the spam comments I've been getting. The standard design I chose for this blog when I set it up had a comment facility turned on. I didn't think it would get much use, but I thought there was no harm in having it there. WRONG! People set up irritating scripts that go around searching for weblog comment forms and post comments automatically with links to their sites (usually porn sites). Why? Well, when Google is working out how to rank sites found in a search it takes into consideration the number of other sites that link to the site. So the BBC get a high rank, because lots of sites contain links to the BBC website, but www.itauthor.com gets a low rank because (as of today) no one has linked to it.

So far I've found out how to remove comments in MT if your blog is saved in a mySQL database, but mine isn't (my ISP doesn't allow it) so I need to keep looking. I will also remove the comments form.

What I'm also looking for is a form that will email comments to me, so that I can vet them and add them to the blog if I choose. I could write this myself in Perl, but there must be an MT module out there that I can use.