I upgraded wordpress to 1.5, hence the different look. I’m still working to figure out what theme I want, and I will be integrating gallery. Hopefully soon!

I’ve turned on the requirement for name and email address in order to post a comment. I’m using the email address list as a whitelist for comments moderation. If you post for the first time with a given email address, the comment may not appear immediately. I set a requirement to moderate comments by new posters. However, any comment from a poster I have already moderated to “approved” will make it past the moderation check.

Email addresses are never posted on the site, nor do I ever intend to use them an any spammy fashion. In case you didn’t know, one of my jobs at work is to bust spammers, so I’m not going to do anything fishy. If you are ultra protective of your address, I’d recommend a disposable system like sneakemail or spamgourmet. Lastly, you can lie, I won’t care. Just remember to use an address you don’t think will ever be used, and remember the address you provided.

Perhaps a sign of gaining acceptance of a blog app is when it starts getting comment spam. I got my first today. Yippie? Fortunately, wordpress has a feature to throw a comment to moderation if it contains more than x number of links.

Now if the bozos give me any more trouble, I’m whitelisting via email address.

I’ve joined the ranks of people who’s moms have found their site. Well, perhaps found isn’t the best term. It was more like, I showed my site to my dad as an example of what I’d set up for him, and, you get the idea.

So not only was the site identified, but read in depth. Every single comment even. Obviously, this leads to some mild discomfort, but it’s far less traumatic than I’d expect. Of course, any mention of the fairer sex was referred back to me multiple times, with questions like “so what are you going to do about that?”

On the other hand, some aspects were quite cool. For starters, hearing your mom say she likes your site is great! It was a neat experience discussing the identities of some of the commenters. “Which Chris is that?”…I explained. Then it got more interesting. “Who’s Brendoman?” So I explained, he’s a guy that went to Biola that I never really met there, but ran across his site after we’d both left the school. She asked me some questions about his plan to visit China. “Who’s Danny?” Danny is a friend of Brendoman, I ran across his site and found we had some similiar interests. What was interesting about this was it was a chance to explain a newer social model to someone who was unfamiliar with it. And beyond that, my posting was behaviour she found quite atypical for me, as I’m very private. So while I’m doing something lots of other are engaged in, at the same time I was reminded it’s something unusual for me.

Now I just have to convince myself not to censor posts any more than previously.

I’ve now added preliminary content to my contact and about pages. Feel free to read up.

I’m slow at CSS, but I managed to figure out how to tab a navbar today, using only style. Now I should eat.