In my endless quest for the fastest, most reliable, and most useful software available, the web browser has until recently been the most difficult application to settle on. For a long time I used IE6, or variants like MyIE2, etc. Then I tried Opera, and I liked the speed, but the featureset and general style of it just weren’t for me.

Flash forward to 2004, when I tried Firefox (or firebird, as it was called at the time). This browser basically had everything I wanted. Speed, tabbed browsing, native popup blocking, and an intuitive extension (plugin) environment with a lot of great extensions available. Over the months I have endlessly tweaked and tried new things with Firefox to get it as perfect as it could be, and I believe I have finally accomplished this. This article will detail, step by step, how *I* personally achieved browser perfection. What’s great for me may suck for you, but I think just about anyone can find *something* in here that’s useful for them. Read on…
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Talking about spammers is more difficult than talking about any other internet group, with the possible exception of child pornographers, for one big reason: you can’t provide links to the things you’re writing about. Well, I suppose that technically you COULD, but then you’d be doing the little weasels a favor, since all their annoying garbage is for the sole purpose of getting their link out anyway.

My site doesn’t get much traffic when compared to big blogs out there. I get probably a 10th or less of the traffic of even medium-well known blogs, but wow do I get spam. Comment spam, mainly. We’re talking 5-10 per day. If you’re reading this and saying to yourself “Pfft, 10 per day? That’s bush league. I get 10 before breakfast,” then I offer you my sincerest condolences, and humbly request a 20 or 30 pixel tall link right up under your header.

The only thing that has kept comment spam from taking over here is a Movable Type plugin called MT-Blacklist. It has been my savior since the first day my site went public. It is a Great White Shark amongst the schools of cod which are spammers. It leaves a thick, lingering trail of scumbag entrails in its wake. It smites would-be comment spammers with a battle axe. And so on.

It also allows me to block spammers from ever commenting in the first place with an amazing black list of spammer domains, constantly updated, and allows me to destroy a spam comment before it ever gets published on my site, even if it isn’t already listed in the blacklist. It uses a divine mixture of my brain and its artificial brain to ensure that not a single spam ever sees the light of day on ianmassey.com, and I cannot invent a word, phrase or sentence which praises it highly enough. If you use movable type, go get it immediately. You will soon delight in slaying hordes of spambots with just a click or two of the mouse, just as I do.