Blogs are built around comments. It’s always fun and rewarding to see your blog have a lot of comments on it. Trouble is, comments attract spam and it’s not always easy to distinguish between legitimate comments and spam.

Here’s a scenario: your post gets popular on Delicious. You get a ton of comments from “SEO BLOG TIPS”  saying “thanks for great post”. Comments like that add no value whatsoever to your blog post. Heck, they devalue it. So here’s the question: do you allow the comment or delete it?

Personally, I consider comments like that spam, but on the other hand, it does get the comment count up. So there it is. A short post, but there’s a reason for it; it’s meant to spark debate, so go on. What would you do?

(poll embedded)

This wasn’t going to be the subject for my post today, but a series of events have changed my mind. Here they are:

Yesterday on my blog, WPShout I published ‘10 Awesome Things to Do With WordPress’ Custom Fields‘. This morning I awoke to find not a single comment on the post. I was disappointed as the post had taken ages, but I didn’t think much more of it. Until this evening. I wanted to email a friend a link to the post, so I loaded up WPShout, only to find the post wasn’t there! In the admin was only my draft from a couple of days ago. Odd, I thought. I copied and pasted the post from Google Reader and republished the post. And then I realized that a heck of a lot of comments I’d spent yesterday evening replying to had gone, and so had my replies. In other words, my database had reverted to a version a couple of days old. Why? I don’t know (if anyone does have any idea, could you drop me an email?!) at this point.

Of course, at this point you’re (probably not) screaming at your monitor

“just restore the backup you’ve got!… you, you do have a backup, right?!”

Yes. Of course I did. Or so I thought. I’d set up the WordPress Database Backup plugin to email me a backup of the database every 24 hours, and that email automatically got archived. Which meant I didn’t see it hadn’t been sent for a couple of weeks because when moving domains I’d forgotten to reinstall the plugin. Which meant I didn’t have a backup.

Where this post is going is simple – don’t be an idiot like me and only realize your backup doesn’t exist when you actually need it, spend five minutes now installing the plugin I mention above and set it up to email you every day. Just don’t archive the email automatically. WordPress Hacks Top Tip: don’t be an idiot….always have a backup.

Are you a Twitter user and WordPress fanatic?   Theme Playground recently published a great list of 50 WordPress peronsalities to follow on Twitter.   Their list includes developers, WordPress bloggers, etc.

I was excited to see our friend Jean-Baptiste Jung make the list, showing he is finally getting the recognition his hard work deserves.   There are also a number of other people included in the list that are worth following, so Twitter users will want to make sure to check Theme Playground’s post.

Some of you may have noticed a lower than normal number of posts over the past two weeks.  This is primarily because of some major server issues we’ve been having, which resulted in all of my sites experiencing quite a bit of downtime.   Fortunately, I think yesterday afternoon we got it figured out and things have been good for the last 24 hours.

While working on our server issues, I had a little spare time that normally would have gone towards blogging.   Here is what I did with my time:

1. Taxes – Having a business requires some changes to how you do your taxes, whether you are an LLC or a sole proprietorship.   As a result, I’ve had to spend some additional time working on the taxes for Apricot Media.  After going through this, I’ve found quite a few ways to improve my processes.  If anyone is interested in learning more about this, I’m planning to write a post about this over the coming weeks on my affiliate marketing blog, Slick Affiliate.
2. Spring Cleaning – Once a year (at least), I’ve always felt it is good to go through your computer and clean up.   This can involve reformatting your computer(s), optimizing databases, backing up files, and cleaning out email and pictures.  We currently have over 120 websites, so this took quite a bit longer this year than in the past.   I also will typically use this time to go through my pictures and music files and make sure everything is backed up on an external drive.

What do you guys do for your computer’s yearly spring cleaning?  Share your tips in the comments!

I’ve never been a major Twitter user, but I have long been fascinated with microblogging as a whole and think it is amazing just how popular and useful Twitter has become over the past year.   TV stations are starting to use it to gather feedback, our local sports radio station is sending out live score updates as tweets, etc.  It is truly amazing!

Back when Twitter was originally launched, I setup an account just like many of you, but I can’t say I use the service as often as a lot of people do.  Maybe it is because I don’t find my own musings as interesting as I find others, or maybe it is the timesink that Twitter can be (just like Facebook), but I just don’t use it as much as I should.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my phone to the new Blackberry Storm (which I could write a four page review of how incredible this phone is) and grabbed the TwitterBerry application.   I’ve found that this application has really helped motivate me to use the service a lot more often now that I can easily keep up with things while I’m away from my computer.  

Because I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my profile here on WordPress Hacks, I figured now was as good of time as any.  If anyone is interested in following me on Twitter, you can follow me here.

I’m also sure many of you have Twitter accounts and I’d love to keep up with what our readers are doing.   If you’d like me to follow you, leave your profile link in the comments.