As you can tell by looking, I’ve completed the switchover from the software I was using to publish my blog—pMachine—to Expression Engine. Expression Engine is distributed by the same company, but it offers several significant features not available in pMachine. The one that motivated me to make the switch is the inclusion of Captcha.

Captcha stands (sort of) for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. You’ve no doubt seen Captcha implementations elsewhere. Captcha generates a graphic image of a word that computers can’t read—only people can. You have to enter the word in a text field to show that you’re a real person and not a machine. As a result, most of the machines that blast comment spam onto blogs are thwarted.

What this means to visitors to this blog is that commenting is once again possible without registering as a member. You can see Captcha at work just by commenting on this (or any other) post.

The conversion to Expression Engine was fairly painless, and the tech support over at pMachine has been great. It’s all handled on message boards, but they have plenty of people participating and their responses are fast and on-target.

It also gave me an excuse to change the look of the blog, incorporating the three-column format I like.

Your comments (I’m pleased to say) are welcome.