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In the past few days, I’ve started getting a few spam comments here on my blog. I guess that means I’ve began getting a (tiny) bit of popularity with the spambot punks. I’m not overly worried about it though. Akismet has done a wonderful job thus far nabbing all of them. When I blogged before, I had a bucketload of spam comments every day. Akismet did a nice job catching those, too. (Kind of odd that I had so many back then, though - my blog wasn’t overly popular.)

But, on the other hand, it’s not like it’s costing spammers much to pollute the internet with their junk. Tossing bots at one more site is 1.) automated and 2.) virtually free.

Ah well. Akismet rocks. WordPress.com rocks.

I’m a happy camper.

If you didn’t know, LibraryThing runs two blogs. Here’s their news blog, and here is Thing-ology, “LibraryThing’s ideas blog, on the philosophy and methods of tags, libraries and suchnot.” Oh, and here’s my LibraryThing profile if you’re wondering what all I have on my shelf thus far.

Technorati Tags: librarything

If you’ve just recently bought the CSS Upgrade for your WordPress.com, there’s a pretty simple way to make your own comments stand out from the others, so that people can easily see where you’ve added to the comment conversation. I’m using the Sandbox theme on my blog here, and it’s through this theme that I added a bit of text after my name in the comments.

To do so, simply add this to your CSS:

.commentauthor-(YOUR-WORDPRESS.COM-USERNAME) .comment-author:after {
content:”… System 13 Blogger” !important;
font-size:70% !important;
}

Obviously, you’ll want to replace YOUR-WORDPRESS.COM-USERNAME with your username that you login with. So, if your username is bob, put:

.commentauthor-bob .comment-author:after {
content:”… System 13 Blogger” !important;
font-size:70% !important;
}

The way this CSS class basically works is that it uses the pseudo ‘after’ element. What this does is add to the page whatever you put for the ‘content’ attribute. As you can see, my CSS adds “… System 13 Blogger” after my name, in the comments. You can make it say whatever you want of course. Furthermore, if you want text to appear before your username, simply change :after (in the CSS selector) to :before.

You can of course also use this little CSS trick to add text to other areas of your design. It’s a nifty way to get around the “no editing HTML” security feature that WordPress.com has right now.

If you want a more graphical difference between comments, you can also customize the look of your comment posts by using a different background image for it.

Technorati Tags: CSS, design, webdesign