Oh, my gawd! I love it! I only wish I’d thought of it myself. Apparently a blogger discovered one of the referral spammers domain wasn’t registered yet so he bought it, taking advantage of the spammers hard, okay … lazy, work. This is just too good for words. Take a look here for a good laugh. There’s also some good information about combating blog spamming.

I found this via Ann Elisabeth’s blog, who also has some good information on the spammers and how she is fighting back. I think I found someone more obsessed than me! It makes me all fuzzy and warm inside.

Another Coldforged gem is his Spell Checker Plugin. It was easy to install once I figured out what aspell is and that it needed to be on your hosting server. Plus I needed to change the $lang = ‘en_US’; to $lang = ‘en’; before it worked properly but that was easy enough. Once I opened the Spell Checker Configuration that is hyperlinked inside the text of the plugin (on the plugin page of WP) the error gives possible solutions. Once I made that minor change it worked like a charm!

There’s also information on the Coldfroged site on how to add the Spell Checker to your comments. Amazingly simple and a true benefit to a blogs commenter. At least I think it benefits users. Maybe that’s because I have never been a great speller. I probably depend on spell checkers more than I should but hey, we all have our vises!

I found another journal writing program, LifeJournal2. It’s a demo of the full version and seems to have everything one needs to journal on a computer. I think it will be harder for anyone with average computer skills to learn than The Journal program I reviewed below. However, it does have more built-in features, such as the time line, life history, pulse input and pulse graph, quotes and a writing timer, just to name a few. Everything is compartmentalized in small popup theme-base boxes which can be confusing but can also create a well organized journal once you learn how to use the program.

Here’s what the Web site says this program can do:

1. Write naturally without changing your writing process to adapt to the software
2. Assign topics to journal entries and passages to later quickly find exactly the text you are looking for
3. Track the actions and quality of your day (your “Daily Pulse”) and automatically cross reference that information with journal entries
4. Search for journal entries by date, topic, word, journal type, and “Daily Pulse”
5. Create a timeline of your life in words, images, and sounds
6. Fully customize your journal–choose color themes, add prompts and quotes, choose up to 10 scales to track, and more!

Looks pretty impressive and probably is impressive once you learn how to use all the features. If you are serious about creating a journal on your computer and want to add interesting features with your entries, then this program might be exactly what you need. I like that I could add sounds but have yet to figure out how to do that. I will play more with this program when I have some extra time.

This program cost $39.95 and you can download it and/or purchase a CD. They also offer e-prompts (email writing prompts) for a hefty $9.95 per month and a companion notebook for $12.95. The e-prompts are sent three times a week but I’m not so sure they are worth the cost. I think you could surf the net and get the same creative shot that a prompt might offer.