I have absolute faith in Akismet. All the spam that piles up under that submenu feels much less annoying because Akismet’s there.
And although I, like her, am usually ticked off that there are hundreds of spam comments that plague Qwerky ever so often, the first spam attempt at Stellify made me smile. And I’ve never needed to try any WordPress anti-spam plugin since.
Just a reminder, though, Akismet is free for personal use only. Commercial uses include problogging (ha!), but only if you’re the really rich problogger-type.
Just to re-iterate, if you don’t fall under our pro-blogger or enterprise uses, Akismet is totally free for you to use on your blog… The lines of commercial and non-commercial personal blogs are hard to draw, so we’re saying if you’re making more than $500/mo from your blog we ask that you use a $5/mo pro-blogger Akismet API
Speaking of plugins, I’ve just held a WordPress plugin installfest on this site. Over half of them I tried out to see if they were any good, only to be ripped out after a few minutes. I pity my database. It’s not that they were horrible plugins; they just didn’t work for me. Only two remained: Jerome’s Keywords and Marekkis Watermark-Plugin.
The first one implements a tagging system onto the blog. Yes, the categorizing issue haunts me still, but the more tags the better. SEO-wise, at least. All that’s left for me to debate upon (with myself, of course) is whether the categories are still useful or not. From a UX perspective, it’s nice to have a bunch of larger, general buckets to catch all that rain (tag clouds, get it?). Anyway, as I’ve mentioned, this site is very Beta, and I’m very flaky.
The second plugin supposedly generates a custom watermark on every image uploaded, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Talk about hit-and-miss ratios.