Recaptcha Anti-Bot Service
Recaptcha is a free service owned by Google (so its safe to assume that its not going away anytime soon) that allows you to protect your site from form/comment/e-mail spam bots by way of utilizing a “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” or CAPTCHA for short. Implementation is as simple as adding a few lines of code, and for many applications and programming languages such as Wordpress and PHP there are easy to install plugins available.
Recaptcha themselves generate and check the distorted images so you don’t need to run costly image generation programs, and it also features an audio test that allows blind people to freely navigate your webpages. Its very secure (where as most other CAPTCHA implementations can be easily broken) and its even used by popular websites such as Facebook, Ticketmaster and Craigslist. Oh yeah, did I mention that its free?
Filed Under Web Apps
Monsters Inc Logo
To say that the people over at Pixar are geniuses is stating the obvious, and it makes no difference how old you are or what type of movies you’re in to because there’s sure to be at least one Pixar film that everyone on the planet will enjoy (for me its The Incredibles). One of my least favorite Pixar films is Monsters Inc, don’t get me wrong its an enjoyable film but its not high on my list … but the logo definitely is.
The thing I’ve noticed about the majority of Pixar movie logo’s is that they’re kinda simple but stand out and are remembered for eternity, and to these eyes the Monsters Inc logo is pure perfection and works on multiple levels.
If you’ve seen the film you’ll know that the company the two main characters work for is the same as the title, but its abbreviated as “M.I”. Look at the logo, its a big “M” with an eye in the middle, representing both M.I and monsters. Combine that with the fact that the stand alone “M-Eye” logo is also used with the text logo then you have yourself one of the most well thought out designs ever created (in my humble opinion).
Filed Under Design
Uptime Robot Site Monitoring
Uptime Robot is a free service that monitors your websites every 5 minutes and alerts you if they go down. You can monitor up to 50 websites and alerts are sent to you via e-mail or SMS. Utilizing a simple and fully Ajaxed interface for faster usage you can add multiple alert contacts to notify multiple users in case of downtime, and you can monitor both http and https addresses allowing you to check if the SSL certificate installed function correctly.
Unless you continuously and manually check to see if you’re host is playing up then you don’t need this free service, and I have a hard time believing that anyone does that. In the past I’ve caught website downtimes just by pure luck, and if you go on holiday for an extended period of time with no Internet access you’ll have no idea whats going on, and with this free service you’ll now have no excuse.
Filed Under Web Apps
China Hates The Internet
China’s battle with Google has brought its net censorship policies to the fore this week. But what does that censorship look like? After Google announced it may stop censoring the Internet in China, I became curious about what exactly that meant. What kind of censoring are they doing? How extensive is it? What can and can’t you do online in the People’s Republic. What does China censor online?
Broadly speaking, most of the big social websites (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) are all blocked. Many familiar sites, such as Wikipedia, remain but with entire sections or contentious pages disappeared by The Great Firewall. Porn is pretty much outlawed. [Guardian News]
First off I need to say that I have no connections to China and I’m not pro or anti Chinese government/establishment, so for me to comment on Internet censorship in China would be wrong because to be honest, I don’t know jack about the situation so I’m not going to pretend and throw out some bullshit on something I haven’t researched thoroughly, so instead I’ll look at this through the eyes of a webmaster.
At first looks you’d think why would I care, I don’t do anything related to China, but then you realize the potential of a mass Chinese Internet market that looks as if its out of reach, but things these days can change in leaps and bounds over the course of a year or two on the Internet. The potential is mind blowing, and if you learn what the rules (or should I say roadblocks) are now, such as knowing whats blocked from the Chinese Internet public and navigating the minefield, you could get your pinkie toe through the backdoor, which could in turn become fruitful later down the track.
Filed Under Misc
