Blogs End. Awesomeness Doesn’t.

The wonderful Daily Awesome is ceasing production in favor of the real world:

When I launched Your Daily Awesome 16 months ago, I was between projects and looking for a creative outlet that incorporated the myriad cultural phenomena that constantly inspire me. YDA was the perfect vehicle for this, and to my great surprise and happiness, other people shared my enthusiasms: The earliest days of the blog drew a few dozen visitors daily. November alone has seen more than 90,000 hits, a level of popularity that excites and humbles me.

But all good things must end, and this is the final entry on YDA as we know it. I am a writer first and an artist second (or vice versa, it’s hard to keep track): Blogging is not my main gig, and for the past several months, I’ve been unable to devote myself to my real work so that I can noodle around on the internet every night, hunting for something appropriately awesome to blog. Those (substantial) daily chunks of time need to be applied to other projects that are more significant to me, creatively and professionally.

When I posted the clip from True Stories of David Byrne deadpanning his way through the history of Texas, I didn’t realize that it would be YDA’s last real post. But if pressed to choose a closing statement, I’d be hard-pressed to select something more appropriate to this blog’s sensibilities.

Infinite thank you’s to Your Daily Awesome’s readers, linkers, and the artists who inspired this blog. I promise to spend my time wisely.

This has been a wonderful source of, well, awesomeness, and will be missed. Life is complex, however, and I can certainly understand the problem is competing priorities.

Happily, the blog is still up, so you can go back and sift through the splendiferous back catalog.

Best wishes to Chas.

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Akismet rocks; upgrades bring hiccups

Spamwall by freezelight
Over the weekend I finally found time for a major set of upgrades to all of the family blogs. One of many impetuses for this was the vast ocean of comment spam that I was dealing with from my blog. I had a CAPTCHA plugin running on this blog which wasn’t always easy for human users to deal with, and which was largely failing to keep out the spam. I was still getting 50-100 e-mails a day announcing the arrival of yet another bit of blog spam, and it sucked.

As part of the upgrade I turned on the Akismet anti-spam plugin that now comes standard with WordPress, and man is it wonderful. In the few days that it’s been working, it’s (correctly) identified roughly 100 spam messages per day, keeping them out of my mail spool and management work flow on the blog.

Unfortunately I only half turned off the old CAPTCHA plugin. The plugin code was all turned off, but the formatting of the comment submission area still had a (now empty) box for the authentication image, and the box for you to type in the code (which you couldn’t see). It turns out that you could post a comment ignoring the code, but that was hardly obvious from a user standpoint, and happily one of our regular readers pointed out the problem.

I believe the problem is now fixed, and I would be grateful if a few folks would post a randomoid comment on this post just to verify that all is now well.

If the Akismet tool continues to do such a good job, I’d like to turn off moderation altogether so that people’s comments will appear immediately. Stay tuned!

Thanks to freezelight for the cool photo.

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