As a user, I absolutely hate captcha images. As a matter of fact, I have actually stopped an online transaction in its place because of a captcha. I just won’t fill one out unless its mission-critical. It’s not that I don’t agree that form-bots are a pain in the ass, I just don’t think that captchas are friendly or well thought out.

Aside from the obvious accessibility issues, they are just a pain to deal with.

Here’s a simple solution. I came up with this after saying to myself “ok, captchas suck, what can you do instead…” and in 5 minutes, i had it.

<div style="display: none;">
	<label for="email">Leave this field blank:</label>
	<input type="text" name="email">
</div>

That simple. Now, just check that its blank on the back-end, and you will be good to go. I used “email” because 1) I try to avoid using such obvious names for form fields…it helps some of the spam right there… and 2) it makes it irresistible to bots. Obviously, don’t name it “email” if you have one named email, but make it something that sounds obvious. A lot of bots wont fill out all of the fields, just ones they “think” are important.

Is it bulletproof? No. Some bots might still get through. But I think its a great compromise between stopping bots, and keeping a friendly experience for your users.

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I’m still around. The last 6-8 Weeks have been about the most hectic I’ve seen yet in terms of work. Luckily though, everything is turning out fine, as it should. Aside from that, I have a personal project that is about to be wrapped up here in a day or two that I will be posting here for all to enjoy. Stay Tuned.

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I threw together a simple Dummy Text bundle for e text editor. Though there is already a lorem-ipsum snippet for e, it only has one paragraph and no formatting.

This bundle is more useful for us developers/designers since it contains formatting, links and lists (depending on which choose), all accessible through the tab shortcut ( “dummy[TAB]” ).

Enjoy, maybe it will save you 20 seconds somewhere…

Download Here

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I’ve only recently, in the last 6 months or so, began to take an object oriented approach to php development. In that time, I’ve all but fallen in love with it. Sure, php4 is limited in its OOP model, but the simplicity of it makes it strong. In the real world, multi-level inheritance isn’t that important, at least not to me. I would like to have the __get and __set functions available to me, but we can’t have everything, can we?

The problem is, though the core of most of my sites are OOP oriented, most of the functionality is procedural still. All of the supporting functions, for example, are just functions, and really have no place, or rather, would gain very little by making objects from them.

But I was thinking the other day, as I was going through the entire codebase of a site to find/replace a function name, about how nice it was to have namespaces in other languages. The problem in this instance was our redirect() function. We tied the whole site and punBB together, but punBB has a function called redirect() as well, and though similar in function, it did a little more than just redirection, so we didn’t want to just use it.

(more…)

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