I’ve been lacking on posting to this blog lately. I’ve not had much time with a big project looming at the office. I need to get back into the swing of things, but I digress…

I recently logged in to check on the status of this blog, and when I did, I found 10’s of thousands of spam caught in the Akismet trap. Had I needed to delete all of those spam messages by hand, it would have taken me weeks. Akismet is a spam recognition filter. It looks for words known to be associated with spam messages, it flags those comments as spam until I can deal with them. Thanks to the handy-dandy one-button deletion, removing all the unwanted spam was a cinch.

For the blogger, spam is becoming a huge problem. The reason behind it isn’t to get you (the author) of the blog to read the spam… it’s not even to get the readers of your comments to click the spam links. It’s to amass a huge amount of inbound links from sites all over the internet. Since Google (and other search engines) algorithms are trained to rank sites based (in part) on the number of incoming links, and these search engines don’t really know or care about the difference between weblog and website, having millions of incoming links posted on blogs everywhere is quite valuable.

There are other methods one might employ when dealing with spam, but in a lot of cases, it’s a hassle or burden to the commenter. Things like verification images, a simple spelling or math question are quite effective at eliminating the bot comment traffic, but forces the human  commenters to perform a trick to prove they’re human. While it’s becoming more and more common, it’s still burdensome to most and should be avoided when possible. That is why I prefer a more passive approach to dealing with comment spam using a method like Akismet.

A little less technical, but an extremely important part of a good CMS system is to always develop (or select a turn-key solution) with your users in mind. That customer might be your organization, or maybe you’re building a project for a client.

It happens all the time. You spend so much time developing the application that every little intimate detail is familiar to you. But what’s easy to forget is that to someone who’s never seen your work yet, it’s not so intuitive. When developing front-end applications like websites, much care and dedication is given to architecting information and creating a self-describing, intuitive user interface. Simplicity tends to win out, and the goal of any website is to be easy to use. Why should the content management system be any different?

Although the audience is (ideally) smaller than the front-end audience, the same level of architecting and information design should be given to the CMS system. I’ve moved on, but one of the places I worked never dedicated any resource or time to developing an easy-to-use, easy-to-implement CMS solution. The result was a poor product, branded with our logo, which cost us more than a handful of hours of free training and support calls. Not to mention that without  a standard, fixing errors or making upgrades always took longer than necessary, because the CMS was never the same from one client to the next.

Give the CMS project the same diligence you gave to the front end and design. Use an information architect and a designer if necessary. Dedicating the time and resources necessary to make a easy-to-use, easy-to-implement CMS solution for your client will save you money and aggrevation in the short and long terms.