After I switched to reCAPTCHA the other day, it took all of half an hour before I saw my first bit of trackback spam. reCAPTCHA can’t do anything about trackbacks, unfortunately, so I withheld judgment.

The trackback spam was shortly followed by a bunch of comment moderation emails from WordPress. It seemed there were dozens of humans out there carefully pasting spam into my comments form and solving the CAPTCHAs. What a sad thought. So I turned Spam Karma 2 back on. After some help, I understood that reCAPTCHA saves spam that does not pass the CAPTCHA for your perusal. (Does anyone actually go back and peruse spam?) Quoth the FAQ:

reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so if you get moderation emails when spam comments are sent, you will get moderation emails for all spam comments with reCAPTCHA. We highly recommend turning off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.

I read this before installing the plugin, but found it confusing. “reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam”? Which comments? All of them? Why would it do that? So, naturally, I ignored the warning.

It turns out that I wasn’t the only one confused. The ambiguity could have been eliminated by adding one word to that sentence. So an exercise in fighting spam becomes a lesson in copywriting.

I still love the reCAPTCHA concept, but I have to stick with Spam Karma for now — unless someone knows a solution for catching only trackback spam.

I’ve attempted to manage my time using the Getting Things Done method for about a year. A cottage industry of GTD aids has sprung up, from the humble Hipster PDA to the fancy Tracks and everything in between. I’ve used Gmail, as outlined in Bryan’s whitepaper, for most of the previous year.

The big selling points of Gmail are:

• labeling
• search
• as a web application, it’s accessible anywhere
• your inbox doubles as your GTD inbox, which means that email message you need to answer is already in your GTD system as an action

I’ll let you read the paper for more details.

After a few months, the system started working against me. Gmail is not the fastest web application on the block, which made weekly reviews (a cornerstone of GTD) a pain. I’d click on all my project labels by rote, wait for the list to load, nod my head, and click on the next one. I wasn’t really processing much.

Your mileage may vary on this next point, but for me, it’s not such a great idea to mix my email and actions. I hated checking email because I’d see all the todos and feel swamped. I hated checking todos because I had to wade through spam and content to get to them. I setup rules to automate some of that, but I was always tweaking my rules in lieu of just Getting Stuff Done. Merlin remarked that your GTD system should be like your coffee cup; mine was a British roadster that lived in the shop (and I know a thing or two about that).

What did I do about it? You’ll have to wait for the next post, because this one has been sitting in my unfinished queue for way too long.

In the 8+ years I’ve been in the web consulting biz, there’s one request I’ve heard over and over: “We just want to be able to edit everything on the site ourselves.”

Do you, now?

The Web isn’t Microsoft Word or even PowerPoint (and I’m sure you’ve seen your share of mangled PowerPoint presentations). If we turned you loose on your own site with next to no knowledge of HTML, what would your site look like in a week? You hired someone to design it and lay it out, right? Why would you want to go back and undo all that hard work?

Yes, there’s a need for the client to have some control over the content of the site. But that control is not easy to build. A custom site requires a custom CMS. For every sexy design feature, you lose content flexibility.

I racked my brain for a way to explain this to the latest client, and finally came up with the following idea. It’s so obvious that I’m probably the last person in this line of work to figure it out.

A typical business site is a billboard. Or an ad. Or a brochure. (We don’t call them “brochureware” for nothing.) You don’t see businesses changing their billboards or radio ads every couple of weeks. Those things cost money and take time to create. How do those businesses deliver up-to-date content to current and prospective customers? They use a newsletter.

What’s the new media equivalent of a newsletter? You’re looking at it.

Newsletters have a set format and delivery schedule, and there’s a per-unit cost. A blog delivers content to as many readers as you want, as often as you want, for free (not counting hosting costs). Most blogging software allows you to create whole pages as well, so you’re not stuck with the post-a-few-lines-about-your-cat format.

Why aren’t more companies buying into this? Maybe because you, Mr. Web Professional, haven’t clued them in to the business benefits of blogging. They (and perhaps you, too) see it as a fad that has nothing to do with the business world. Sure, some corporations are tinkering with blogs, but that’s just a cheap marketing trick, right? Well, it could save you some serious headaches as a consultant.

Try this. Tell your client that you’ll scope and build a fancy custom CMS for their fancy custom site. Then, almost as an afterthought, show them the Typo or WordPress blog that it took you thirty minutes to set up. Tell them they can use that as an interim content-management solution until you get the “real” CMS done. They’ll thank you for giving them a whole new marketing channel, and send you more interesting and useful work.

And they’ll forget all about the fancy custom CMS — the one that never gets finished and no one is satisfied with anyway.

Boy, did I need to read this last month.

Career coach Cathy Goodwin has ten tips for managing time during a career or other life change.

My favorite quote: “During the crucial stages of a life transition, you need to run on two tracks at once.”

Thanks to Curt at The Occupational Adventure for the link. Just the latest of many useful ideas to be found on his site.

I know I’ve fallen down on my promise to post once a day. Oneword, while nifty, doesn’t really count. But I’ve been hard at work on something almost completely different.

Stay tuned. I should have more news by the end of the week.

Angela Booth on why writers should blog, especially newbies.

Doesn’t validation feel great?

It bothers me that I’m not posting frequently. It’s not that I don’t want to — I’ve just been treating posts like polished essays, and spending upwards of an hour on every one. Well, some of the more popular bloggers out there don’t even bother with titles, and just spit out a sentence or two every couple of hours. While following my daily train of thought is not the purpose of this blog, there’s something to be said for keeping the gears lubed. With that in mind, I’m going to do my best to throw out at least one post a day. This one’s already taken too long to write. See you tomorrow morning at the latest.

One of the things I found useful after setting up GTD with Gmail was the Greasemonkey script that adds a delete button to the Gmail interface. Greasemonkey, if you’ve been living under a rock, is a Firefox extension that allows a web developer to make “aftermarket” changes to an existing web site. Such as adding a delete button to Gmail.

However.

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you know that the latest versions of Greasemonkey have had serious problems. Nothing seemed to work after upgrading. This morning I found a simple fix. I upgraded to Greasemonkey 0.5.3, followed the directions, and all is well again. Even my Gmail saved searches work, for the first time. If you’ve been in Greasemonkey withdrawal like me, the craziness is over.

A few weeks back, this post made the blogosphere rounds with some good reasons not to keep a blog.

Here is one great reason to ignore that stuff and do it anyway.

One thing I’ve lacked, so far, is the discipline to post or at least draft something every day. I don’t want to use the “I don’t have time” crutch; that’s an excuse that I wave around when I start to see writing (or flying or coding or housekeeping) as a task, as opposed to an opportunity.

That’s right, folks. Joe Corporate wants desperately to squeeze onto the blog bandwagon. Now you can profit from his me-too-ism. Sneer if you like, but it’s an opportunity to write professionally.

Thanks to Angela for the link.