Hmm, over five months since my last (published) post. I don’t know how folks like Tim and Sam keep writing every day. I’ll have to ask when I see them at ApacheCon US in New Orleans.

I fell off the blogon while trying to prepare my two presentations for ApacheCon Europe and have yet to catch up with my email since then. Seriously, I spend way too much time reading and deleting email, so if you’ve sent me something and haven’t received a response then please understand that it isn’t because I don’t like you (unless, of course, you sent it to several of my email addresses at once, in which case it was probably blocked as spam).

Whenever I did find time to blog, I found myself wanting to update the software first, fiddle with the comment settings, or try out various blogspam avoidance tricks. My personal blog runs on WordPress, both because it’s cool cutting-edge open source software and because my ISP won’t let me run anything written in Java (let alone Day’s commercial products). It also has the nice side-effect of forcing me to pay attention to everyday web content management issues, instead of just the more abstract (implementation independent) issues of Web protocols. In other words, it keeps me in the loop in terms of what people are looking for in public-facing web content management. And, if I want to see what it looks like through our own software, I can just wander over to Planet Day.

One area in which open source blogging software is way ahead of the curve is support for collaborative antispam solutions. I’ve been much happier with my blog since I installed the TypePad Antispam plugin. The social filtering of blog spam is even more effective than it has been for Gmail, especially given the setting to automatically discard comments that look like spam on old posts. I wonder how long it would take Michael Marth to write an Apache Sling plugin for comment filtering using the TypePad service?