It was not intentional, but I did not pay very much attention to this site during the last two months. In between work (as always, ridiculously busy during September), social obligations, and the exhaustion that accompanied trying to meet them, there was just not enough time to work on things here. Luckily, this seems to have changed in the past week. Unfortunately, I suspect that this has only occurred because I am actively attempting to make time for this website.
Sometime last week, I reset my administrator password and logged into the administration section of this website. I was horrified to find that about a hundred spam comments had been made since I switched from threadedcomments (a third party Django application) to the new integrated comments framework. While the new framework includes several features to prevent spam (otherwise, I would have had thousands of comments), but could not stop all of them. When I upgraded, I had planned to come back the next day to hack into Akismet moderation. This never happened.
Compelled to act, I followed these instructions to run all submitted comments through Akismet. Strangely, as I edited the Python source code files, I felt a strange feeling of happiness. I am not sure why I find working and writing here exciting as opposed to tedious, but I am glad that it does.
Since then, I have tried to spend more time here. Most of it has involved small incremental changes (e.g. commenters' websites are now be displayed properly) since my homegrown Django blogging application still has less features than more mature packages like WordPress, but I am working on a photo application (think Flickr) since my local photo management solutions (one out-of-date iPhoto library and several folders full of JPEGs) are not working.