God only knows, God makes his plan.
The information's unavailable to the mortal man.
…Slip Slidin' Away

About a year ago, I mentioned how I was giving until it hurts by supporting one brother-in-law and his family here in the Philippines. Soon after that, I started supporting ANOTHER brother-in-law and his family. Charity never ends.

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Dealing with life in general can be frustrating in itself. Dealing with someone else's life can be even more frustrating. I and my wife are extremely close, more so than the average couple in my opinion. Despite our language differences, and I won't get into that right now, we've had no serious relationship problems in almost 25 years (more than 23 of that as a married couple). Still, the events of the last few years have been taxing on both of us.

I'd like to give you a rundown of these events so that you can see where I'm coming from. This will probably end up being one of my longest posts.

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There are some things in life where I will accept no substitutes. Coffee and tea are two of these things. Recently, I was reminded by Claire (A little piece of me) that while some people like lemon in their tea, others do not. She, like me, does not like lemon in her tea. She needs "proper" tea, whatever the heck that means.

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There is what seems like a thousand plugins available to reduce comment spam from appearing on our blogs. If any single plugin worked, why would there be so many different ones, each attacking comment spam in a different way?

As I remarked in "Four Ways to Provide Convenience to Your Readers", a post at The Reader Appreciation Project, commenters go for the path of least resistance.

What comment reduction methods create resistance to real comments? Any form of CAPTCHA, including math problems. Anything that slows the commenting process down is resistance. Many potential commenters will choose not to comment rather than go through any process other than a normal form-filling process. Even though we don't want to discourage comments, we still have to do something about the comment spam.

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Other blogs are pinging your blog and your blog isn't receiving them. Have you ever wondered why? Do you care? If you don't know or you don't care, how do you know anyone is pinging you? Are you relying on a 3rd-party service like Technorati or are you waiting for them to appear on your dashboard? Technorati doesn't always respond to pings and your dashboard relies on Google's blog search (although this can be changed in the later versions of WordPress). Wouldn't fixing the incoming ping problem be a better solution?

This is a follow-up to both "WordPress Bloggers: Fix Your Incoming Pings With WP_PingPreserver" and "A WordPress Guide to Pingbacks and Trackbacks". This time, the emphasis is on your theme code.

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