This is by no means a new post (May 2006), but it’s still relevant. Nobody likes CAPTCHAs. It can be hard to decipher the letters and they’re annoying. They help keep the spam down though.

Well, there’s a better solution than forcing people to enter twisted letters and numbers into a form. JavaScript. The modern web pretty much doesn’t work without JavaScript, so people have pretty much stopped turning it off (the few that do are wackos who wish the web was still the way it was back in the days of the MOSAIC browser).

Safer Contact Forms Without CAPTCHA’s

15 Days of jQuery’s tutorial teaches how to implement an interesting technique that uses JavaScript to generate unique strings that are verified in the form processing script on the server. If the strings are null or false, the script denies the client access. It’s not foolproof, of course, no anti-spam solution is, but it’s a great deterrent, and a far less annoying one than CAPTCHA.

The Web Squeeze has recently published a large collection of recommended places to find free stock photos.

40 Free Stock Photo Sites.

Stock photos are very useful, and of course it’s nice to not have to pay for them. A well-placed photo can liven up a text-heavy blog post, and attract attention from StumbleUpon users if placed near the top. They’re also good for ad creatives, and other things where a photo can improve the overall look.

It’ll probably take you awhile to go through the list, but it’ll probably be worth your while if you bookmark some of your favorites as you check the sites out. Then you can refer to your more compact list of sites the next time you need a stock photo.

This question is asked so often. Is it just me, or is this a pointless question?

Bloggers have come-up with theories that the best times to post are right before the start of most peoples’ work day, and around the time they get back from work.

But does it really matter?

My theory is that if you post early in the morning, simply because there will be more time over the course of the day for people to see it. If you use an RSS reader, do you have to catch a post as soon as it’s out? No, your reader will note the new post, and display it to you no matter what time it is, as long as it’s been published. Therefore, you post as early as possible, so as many people as possible will see it over the day.

It’s kind of pointless to try to post at weird times over the day to try to get more people to see at once. Just timestamp the posts to sometime in the morning.

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Anyone can have a blog, what with all of the instant blog services like Blogger and WordPress.com. But just because they can have a blog doesn’t mean they should.

I believe that it’s important that it be possible for anyone who has something to say to publish their thoughts online. However, the key part is “anyone who has something to say.” I don’t like the idea of an internet full of narcissistic personal blogs and ad-filled John Chow wannabes. If you have something real to say, or if you’re an unusually interesting person, go right ahead and launch a blog. Plan it out though. Don’t just throw something together in five minutes on a whim. (Also, I recommend getting a domain name if you want to be taken seriously.)

I like the idea of web publishing being fairly easy, but sometimes I wonder if it’s a little too easy.

My general rule of thumb is “if you have something interesting to say, and the initiative the keep the blog going for longer than a year, go right ahead.”

The first thing most people think when they turn a Mac on for the first time is something along the lines of “Wow. This looks cool.” Then the next thing you notice, or more accurately, don’t notice, is the act of using the OS. Once you get used to how everything works, which doesn’t take long if you’ve used another OS (read: Windows) before, you don’t have to think about it. It’s intuitive enough that you just do what you need to do without having to think about it much. You don’t have to worry about the OS itself much either, except when you need to do some occasional maintenance.

The Mac OS is

• Good-looking
• Intuitive/Usable
• Simple

Those three bullet points are some of the most important things to think about when it comes to web design. Obviously you want to have a good-looking design (don’t tell me you like GeoCities-style pages…). The other two points are very important. If you must have a horrible-looking design, the second two points are worth putting some thought into.

Simplicity doesn’t necessarily mean having a Google-esque design. You could classify Digg as a fairly simple design, though not to the point of Google. Ideally you want to simplify elements of your design, to make it more usable, but that doesn’t mean you have to not have any images or color. Read the rest of this entry »

One day you’ll outgrow your $5 a month shared hosting account and need more resources to cope with all the Digg front page stories and StumbleUpon successes in addition to your large amount of search engine traffic. Or maybe your site is still fine with budget shared hosting, but the host you’re currently on has been getting on your nerves (e.g. billing you too much, having excessive downtime).

Whatever your reason, you may have to move to a different server sometime. It can be a whole day’s work, and if you’re not careful you could lose data or have your site go offline for a few days.

Here are the basic steps to move to a new server:

1. Put your site into maintenance mode, so people don’t go around adding comments to your blog or otherwise changing database tables while you work.
2. Backup your entire website. Get every file, every database table, and note settings from your control panel.
3. Order your new hosting plan, and wait for it to be set up.
4. Once you have the new hosting space, go through the control panel options and set them to whatever your site requires.
5. Upload your files, and import your databases.
6. Go through files and set database access information to the new server’s values. Also, if you use absolute paths (e.g. /home/user/www/index.php) on your site, you may have to update them if the servers are configured differently.
7. Update your domain’s DNS settings to point to the new server. If all goes well, your domain will start pointing to the new server somewhere along the line, and your visitors will seamlessly start going to the new server. Use DNS Pinger so you know when the update is complete, so you can make sure nothing went wrong once the DNS updates.
8. Address anything that goes wrong. Believe me, there’s a 90% chance that you’ll overlook something unique to your case that needed to be addressed during the move.
9. Don’t cancel your old hosting account for at least a month, in case you need to refer to something there.

Want to learn a little more about how to effectively monetize online content? Be sure to listen to the Online Advertising For Newbies podcast from South by Southwest. It was recorded by a panel of people who know what they’re talking about, such as blogger Darren Rowse, DoubleClick manager Heath Row, blogger Wendy Piersall, and AdBrite VP of Sales Jim Benton.

The podcast covers a reasonably wide range of methods to monetize a website, and good practices for doing so. It’s definitely worth listening to if you’re slightly above “ad newbie” status, and are trying to find something better than pushing AdSense blocks in people’s faces.

(As a side note, I wonder if this should really be called a podcast. Technically it isn’t, since it’s a single audio file, instead of a series of episodes delivered via RSS. But how many people really care?)

The upcoming launch of AdSense for RSS has sparked an explosion of outrage throughout the internet (especially in places like Digg). Many of the Diggers complained that RSS is no place for ads, and that the world is coming to an end because feeds will have, the horror, ads in them.

Listen up: Don’t expect to get good content for nothing. If you want to read full content in your RSS reader, expect to start seeing more ads. Many feeds already have ads in them, and the publishers have every right to put them there. Are you paying for the content? Probably not. So why are you complaining about some unobtrusive contextual ads?

The core principal behind RSS is to provide notification of new content. While it’s true that full article content can be offered in a feed, don’t get bent out of shape if it isn’t. You either get summaries, or full feeds with ads. Yes, there are a lot of sites that don’t mind giving away content for free, and aren’t too worried about everyone seeing ads (myself included), but don’t expect everyone to be that way. You’re given ad-free RSS feeds because the publisher wants to; you don’t have a “right” to have ad-free content. If you don’t like it, you can unsubscribe.

In my opinion, the full RSS feed concept is flawed. I believe RSS is supposed to serve as a notification of new content, not a way of getting content without visiting the actual website. (Note that the Webmaster-Source feed is full anyway, as a convenience for people who don’t share my reasoning.) The way I normally use RSS is to have just article titles, which click through to the web location of the article. NewsFire for the Mac OS can be set-up this way, and the MyNT RSS reader works much the same way by default. I prefer to visit the article on the actual website, both to support the website, and to view the content as originally intended.

On the Digg page regarding AdSense for RSS, several users immediately started giving advice on how to block the ads via the Windows HOSTS file, and saying that the AdBlock developers had better get going and write software to remove ads from RSS. (Some of the Diggers have some sense, though, and have left comments pointing out the idiocy of the anti-ad arguments.) Let it be noted that I’ve defended AdBlock on a few occasions in the past. However, there is some merit to the argument that blocking ads is stealing from the publisher. I do not blanket-block ads. I do use AdBlock to nuke particularly irritating advertisements on occasion, but I think it’s rather selfish to insist on not having any ads at all. As tempting as it is to block every network ad imaginable, I don’t do it. Plugins like AdBlock shouldn’t even be “necessary.” It’s the publishers’ responsibility to not place annoying ads. If they don’t keep ads to a tolerable level, by all means, strip the ads out with AdBlock.

There’s a scientific term that’s fitting here: “There is no free lunch.” If you’re not paying a subscription, why are you complaining about some ads? I can see complaining about Forbes.com, but what about a site with reasonable ads?

June 2008’s featured WordPress theme is DarkZen, by Daily Blog Tips.

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