But today I installed an effective solution which is not only free (that magic word), it's also easy to set up. And ?easy' is, of course, the other magic word that we all love so much.

First I set up a new WordPress blog at Harmedia.com - and that was as easy as falling off a log because I used Fantastico which is built into CPanel webhosting.

Just now I am finishing things off with a few extra plugins. Including reCAPTCHA which is available free. And as I mentioned, it is so easy to install.

Step 1. You download it from recaptcha.net and unzip the file.

2. You upload the two .php files to your Wordpress plugins folder.

3. Then you go to your Plugins page and activate reCAPTCHA by clicking it. For more details www.greateducationonline.com The new page reminds you to enter the 2 big long numbers you got when you registered at recaptcha.net (called public and private keys and they are unique to this one site of yours). That's it. You're all set.

WHY I LIKE reCAPTCHA

- It's free.

- It works.

- There is no messing around with copying code into your blog template.

- No permissions to change. (CHMOD isnt hard once you know what you're doing but the learning curve before that has befuddled many a beginner, I'd say.)

- A feel-good bonus is the fact that you're helping the Internet Archive to improve the accuracy of its Optical Character Recognition software.

How so? Because the words shown come directly from old books that are being digitized. Words that the OCR software cannot read are fed into captchas and if multiple users like you and me all render it the same way then that result is entered into the OCR memory.

So not only does your blog get protected from robot spam, your commenters are helping old books get digitized correctly.

Are you using captchas to protect your blog from comment spam yet? For more details www.greatindustrialguide.com It's free and it's easy. What are you waiting for?

By the way, CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", although ironically the recaptcha.net site does not include the word Public in its explanation of the term. So.. would that make it a CATCHA? - without the P.