There are several elements that are absolutely integral to running a successful blog. You’ve got to have access to your RSS feed featured prominently near the top of the page. You need to have an About page that tells your readers a little more about yourself and your blog. You need to activate the comment form so that visitors can provide real time responses to your post, hopefully setting an interesting conversation into motion.
One other element that every blog should have is a means to contact the blogger directly. On the BlueFur blog, because it is still connected to the web hosting business, the contact information is provided as a company contact page. That said, most blogs opt for a contact form. This is to help reduce the amount of spam that would be received if there was a direct link to an email address instead.
Even so, contact forms are vulnerable to spam as well. I’ve talked about this on Beyond the Rhetoric already, saying that I have included a skill-testing question as part of the contact form to help reduce the amount of contact form spam, but they keep coming in. After writing that post, I updated the anti-spam question and it seems to have worked.
Up until then, the question would be mathematical in nature. It would be something like “1 + 1 = ?”. I thought that this was going to be enough and while it probably worked a little, it didn’t work well enough. It could be that a “bot” understands what the question is asking and actually provides the correct answer, thus bypassing the anti-spam measure.
Since then, the anti-spam question on the Beyond the Rhetoric contact form has been changed to involve words instead. No spam has come through thus far, so it seems to be working. This is a much easier and more user-friendly solution that Captcha.
