Just over a year ago, I finally got with the 21st century and started up a new blog. Team Soell. You're reading it now. The biggest headache that has come up in the whole process, apart from keeping up the motivation to write decent articles, is keeping up with the ridiculous amount of blog spam that goes with the territory.

When Team Soell first launched, the comments section was wide open; no registration required, no moderation, just immediate publication of everyone's comments. Over the past year, this policy slowly got ratcheted down to it's current position, where all comments are moderated. But add to that my lack of motivation in reading through 50 v14gr4! adverts every day, and we ended up with a pretty useless system. Ask anyone who has tried to comment on my articles in the past six months, and they'll tell you.

Over the past several months, I've had the opportunity to work with the Joomla content management system, and it has proven itself to be a pretty solid contender. With its open source license, flexible templating system, and with army of plugin developers to tap into, it seems like a solid platform to switch to. So today, I'm relaunching the "andy" portion of the Team Soell blog in the newly-released Joomla 1.5 framework. Comments require approval at this point, but it is supposed to be smart enough to recognize repeat commenters.

So take a look, let me know if anything seems broken, and thanks for everyone's patience.

[Update] Nathan mentioned the Akismet Anti-Spam filter that WordPress runs, and I realized that the commenting plugin I'm using supports that as well. I've enabled the Akismet filter which should drastically reduce site spam. In light of this, I have turned on guest commenting -- we may have to turn moderation back on eventually, but I'm curious to see how well this system actually works.

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