I’d just like to take a moment to recognize the efforts of Matt Mullenweg and gang at Akismet.  When I first set this blog up, I started getting a lot of spam comments, so I set it such that each comment had to be manually approved.  What happened is that sometimes a comment would sit for a few days, making people feel unloved.  A few months ago, I installed the Akismet WordPress plug-in and trusted that I could let comments post automatically.  As it turns out, I was right.  After almost 5,000 comments have been filtered, the detection has been nearly perfect.  I’ve been amazed at how well it has done, not only with filtering spam, but also with not filtering legitimate comments (when I actually get them).  If you run your own WordPress instance, or anything else that gets input from the webosphere, I highly recommend it.