Recent Blog Updates: CAPTCHA and SpeedLinking

I’ve made some updates in the last couple days that I wanted to share.
Fighting Spam
Spam… the bane of my existence! Comment and Trackback spam has increased pretty drastically in the last few months. I’ve decided to enable a CAPTCHA on all comments.
SpeedLinking
I’ve taken a hint from the Integral Options Cafe, and have just started speedlinking. What is SpeedLinking?

Speedlinking, aka linking, blog-linking, or linkblogging is the practice of writing a brief post with hyperlinks to favorite websites or blogs. Usually the post will contain anywhere from 3 to 5 links and each link will be accompanied by a one line description and a one line personal opinion.

All speedlinks are stored in del.icio.us. Although the speedlink posts may not happen every day, I’ve still created a script that will check for all of my posts tagged as ‘speedlink’ for the day, and will automatically create a post via the Movable Type API. Actually, this script is a modified version of the one originally provided by Jeffrey Veen. The original Perl script works great. I just made some simple “hacks” since I didn’t want to deal with some additional XSLT libraries. The modified script uses XML::Simple instead.
Enjoy!