By the end of Episode 11 of Gossip Girl Season 3, a lot of unfortunate things happened. That’s also the time wherein Serena decided to go with Trypp. Now this episode continued the tangled arrangement of the previous episode. But compared to the previous one, it’s not as complicated. Anyway, Trypp decides to go with Maureen’s plan to keep face. But it seems that Serena doesn’t want that. She decides to end things with Trypp. So on their way to the city, the two met an accident. Serena being seated on the death seat passanger’s seat is wounded due to the accident. On the other hand, Chuck is fighting his own battle. Later on, he’s able to redeem himself . . . from the memories of his father’s death.

Sorry for the late update – I tend to forget at times. Anyway, the next installment will be on March 8, 2010.

One best part about WordPress is it’s supported by an array of plugins. And these plugins vary from the design and outlook of the website down to the most scrutinized part like security. Security is a very broad term . . . more so, it covers a lot of aspect. So to keep our discussion more specific, let’s just focus on one aspect of security and that is: ANTI-SPAM.

Spams or junk messages are very common in the blogging world. And the most common forms of spams are those that endorses explicit products. And such are not pleasant to the eyes – of the visitors and the webmaster. Who would want those in a decent website anyway? Thank goodness there is such a thing called ANTI-SPAMS. As the word implies, they are against spam messages. They filter contents to find out which is real and which is plain spam. Of course, each webmaster is aware of this and they have their own preferred anti-spam control/plugin. And for me, the best anti-spam is still Akismet.

Here are the reasons why Akismet is still the best anti-spam plugin:

It’s easy to use

Akismet is a one click installation. Maybe not for you still need to supply an API key for it work. But after that, it will work on it’s own. No need to make changes in the layout buy installing codes etc.

It’s highly maintained

WordPress updates regularly. Of course, whenever there is a new version some plugins do not work. And in the case of Akismet, they can easily match WordPress fast updates.

Unfortunately, Akismet is not perfect. Even though it filters spam, there are still spam who passes through it’s security. Moreover, the spams are stored for 1 month.

But this gap in Akismet is filled in by a plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA. This plugin works hand-in-hand with Akismet to fight spams. If Akismet flinches in detecting a spam, conditional CAPTCHA will take over. A random CATCHA will appear to confirm the identity of the user. Obviously, if the commenter fails to answer the CAPTCHA his comment will be branded as spam. And with this, spam comments are automatically trashed.

It’s a one-click installation. Other than that, updates on the theme isn’t necessary either.

Why don’t you give this a try? Who knows . . . maybe this is the answer to your spam problems!