With some extra time at New Year’s, I took the chance to make some site overhauls and improvements, the last of which were finished last night.
The biggest update was the removal of a plugin that was putting a heavy load on the database server. Though it is unlikely that non-commenting users noticed this due to [...]

To offer a quick update on the trackback/comment spam attack I reported on yesterday, the attack is continuing in earnest today but things seem to be much more under control now.
reCAPTCHA is still holding the comment spam at bay and I have swapped out Akismet for Defensio in hopes of reducing the number of trackbacks [...]