New Features

It didn't take me as long as I'd expected: you can now add comments to (most of) my posts. I'm going to try leaving things open for now–I've added some basic functionality which should block most of the comment-spam bots out there (details after the jump). Also, I've updated the front page and the RSS feed to now only show the first part of my posts.

The trick for blocking spam comments is fairly simple, and I wish I could take credit for it. However, I read it in passing on another APEX developer's blog, and now I can't find it; if you know, please tell me, so I can give credit where it's due. UPDATE: I found the post. It's by Martin Giffy D'Souza, whom I got to hear present on using the APEX dictionary at this year's Kaleidoscope conference. He's got a lot of great information on his site, so go check it out!

The comments form has a text field that you can't see. But, rather than making it a hidden input (I suspect bots may be smart enough to recognize those), I put style=”display:none;” in the HTML Table Cell Attributes (in the Element block) of the page item. This makes the entire

disappear from the page, but I'm betting that bots won't notice that in the code. (The original blogger assigned a class, further obfuscating the fact that the field is hidden.) Then I applied a condition to the save comment process, so it only runs if that page item is still null. If a bot puts a value in the field, it'll just quietly hit the old bit bucket.