The future of CAPTCHA
Posted by Robin Whittleton on July 23, 2008 at 03:07 PM
CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) must have seemed like a good idea when it was first invented in 2000. Spam was beginning to become a major problem on the web and a method was needed to fight back. CAPTCHA at first glance seems ideal: a distorted image that would be instantly recognisable by humans yet incomprehensible to machines. Place some letters in the distorted image and get the user to type them back and bingo: you’ve stopped your spam problem.
Type on the Web: Don't fight it, feel it.
Posted by Gavin Shinfield on May 06, 2008 at 08:15 PM
One perennial web design issue that continues to vex and frustrate designers and clients alike is the limited number of typefaces available for text when set in HTML (i.e. without resorting to images or Flash).
But please don’t struggle against the tide. Go with the flow.
Why it's all in the bounce
Posted by Piers H Palmer on April 08, 2008 at 04:59 PM
Google Analytics rocks! I could spend hours/days/weeks sniffing about the statistical minutiae that Google Analytics serves up. Three users from X visited my site last week and each spent Y minutes on landingpage Z having been referred there by using the search term Z – amazing but probably not that useful.
If there is one metric you should look at, check out the bounce rate, the ‘I came, I puked, I left’ metric as so lucidly explained by Avinash Kaushik – check out the video presentation.
Microsoft really don't want to break the Internet
Posted by Paul Sturgess on January 25, 2008 at 06:34 PM
When IE8 is released there is talk of it rendering, by default, as if it were IE7.
IE8 passes the Acid2 Test
Posted by Paul Sturgess on December 20, 2007 at 12:40 PM
Microsoft proves it has genuine intentions to make Internet Explorer 8 Web Standards compliant.
Size matters (again!)
Posted by Gavin Shinfield on December 19, 2007 at 07:26 PM
Well it must be Christmas because the parcels are flowing thick and fast through Kyan Towers. Our nice postie left a particularly sweet little package on my desk the other day
in the shape of the tiny new sub-notebook from Asus, dubbed somewhat peculiarly the eeePC.
New standards compliant Apple store
Posted by Paul Sturgess on October 02, 2007 at 09:33 AM
Great to see one of the most prominent brands and technology leaders finally catching up with the ‘correct’ way to build web sites.
How API's have changed the 'net
Posted by Paul Sturgess on August 17, 2007 at 01:04 PM
When we went to the Future of Web Apps conference a while back everyone was raving about API’s – “You must build an API” we were told. I had no idea how much of an impact they were going to make.
Vanity and Volcanoes
Posted by Gareth Adams on August 16, 2007 at 03:45 PM
I guess every geek goes through a phase of wondering just how geeky they are.
I recently got an email from my new landlord, whose surname is Maltby. They’d cleverly managed to buy ltby.com, which meant their email addresses were all in the form …m@ltby .com
This got me thinking about other kinds of domain hack, and to cut a long story short I now own the rethada.ms domain
It means I now have the very concise email address “g@rethada.ms” and eventually a site at http://ga.rethada.ms
All of this is made possible thanks to the sparsely populated, volcanic-ash-covered Caribbean island Montserrat. Since their population of just over 4000 don’t make use of the territory’s TLD they offer it out to non-residents without restriction, much like other vanity TLDs like .tv (Tuvalu) and .tk (Tokelau)
Needless to say, I’m pretty confident about my geekuality now.