Enabling comments is a great way to make your blog interactive. You know the psychology - if you've posted a newsgroup post or submitted a comment to someone's blog, you'll want to keep checking whether you've gotten any response. That's how interactivity encourages user loyalty, and consequently increases traffic. Trackbacks are like comments, only someone is commenting on your blog on their blog, and including a link back. Wordpress will add the trackback automatically to your blog, and it's fun to see who's linking to your blog. Besides, links increase traffic and pagerank.

To activate comments and trackbacks, go to your Wordpress Dashboard, and select Options –> Discussion and check mark the corresponding boxes.

The downside: spam. Unscrupulous people are spamming the blogosphere with automated comments and trackbacks, ostensibly to increase traffic to their sites that sell some snake oil and whatnot. This can be a real problem - your comments section can fill with spam comments and trackbacks at an amazing rate, to the point that many have disabled comments and trackbacks altogether.

But there is a way! Enter Akismet.

This is a Wordpress plugin that detects spam comments and trackbacks automatically, and moves them to a spam folder for you to review and delete forever. Here's how to install Akismet, this wonderful thing:

Go to Wordpress / Plugins. Find and activate Akismet - it's already there. Next you'll need to go and get an API key from Wordpress.com. Sign up for an account - you can either sign up for just the API key, or you'll be asked to start a blog, go ahead and name your blog (even if you are not planning to blog at wordpress.com), and finish signing up, then go to your Account (link on top left) and select Profile. Here you are presented with your unique API key. Copy that.

Now, go back to your Wordpress Dashboard, and select Plugins –> Akismet Configuration. Paste your API key into the corresponding field and hit Update.

That's it! Now, go to Manage –> Akismet Spam - this is where all the spam comments will go automatically from now on. You can either review the comments or just trust Akismet and hit Delete all.

Now you've got an interactive blog, free from spam comments and trackbacks.