Demented Kitty Misc

Captchas annoy me, yet I can get behind how effective they can be at limiting spam posts and accounts on forums, blogs, and plenty of commercial web sites too. So I both like and dislike the idea of reCaptcha. It is still a captcha. It still suffers the usual guesswork ("Is that an L, an I, a squiggle S, a T, or maybe a shallow C?").

However, reCaptcha "improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher." I kinda dig that.

I'm not sure about the code for incorporating reCaptcha yet, but I see that plugins already exist for the applications with which I am most familiar. Also, at least at first glance, it doesn't look like one need rely on javascript to pull from or write to reCaptcha's service. php, python, java, and ruby code snips are available. That's a nice touch.

I'm playing around a bit with a status meter that doesn't rely on javascript. A little research lead me to several examples on the web, but none that were simple. So I'm writing my own and plan to put the results here at a later date.

For now, working betas are on the front pages of Accidental Hedonist and Wednesday Wordsmith.