Daily Links
Facebook Adds Microformats
Facebook has marked up all events with the hCalendar microformat including marking up their venues with hCard as well. According to a simple Google search, that's millions of public events now with microformats.Louis Riel Day 2011 Long Weekend Closures
A good list of services and locations open and closed during the long weekend, via Access Winnipeg.RadioHead Releases King Of Limbs a Day Early
RadioHead did a stealth release of their new album via their website this morning. Downloading now!Looking at Design and Now I Want a House in the Hollywood Hills
With the new office plans starting to take shape, I've been bouncing around various furniture and architectural sites. Love the modern lines and our green colour in the above shot. I had also just finished sketching out office desks that look just like this. (linked on Coudal.com)Twitter Blocks UberMedia Apps
The microblogging service has suspended its apps, which include mobile clients UberTwitter, Echofon, and Twidroyd, as well as an advertising product, citing a number of violations.Daily Links
Shaw Customer Discussion Sessions
UBB isn't going away, if you're a Shaw customer and have something to say try and get an invite to one of these sessions.The Jets are Coming Back! Again.... well maybe?!?
Forget Phoenix!! Atlanta holds the key if Winnipeg is to get an NHL teamKyle Gass Interviews Dave Grohl About How To Write A Hit
Dave Grohl provides us with some invaluable tips on how to write a hit. This is worth your 4 minutes.Pixelfari
8-bit internet browsing!Festival Du Voyageur This Weekend
The 42nd annual Festival Du Voyageur launches this weekend from February 18 – 27, 2011. This once 3-day event has evolved into a 10-day province-wide celebration of sights, sounds, snow and spirit.Eight WordPress SEO Plugins
This is a listing of top-notch WordPress plugins for SEO to improve your WordPress site's search engine rankings.An Update to Google Social Search
Having social info handy is interesting, but usually seems to add noise to what should be relevant results :/Cardboard Flashdrives
Art Lebedev Studio has a concept design for disposable data storage. I could see these made into some great business cards.After Largely Ignoring Warnings The Government Gets Hacked
GhostNet identifiers informed our government back in 2009 that they had to increase security or they where going to get hacked. We waited until late 2010. Then we got hacked. Way to go feds, us computer nerds don't know what we are talking about. Never listen to us.Daily Links
Manitoba Museum Free Admission
The Manitoba Museum is celebrating Louis Riel Day by offering free entrance on Sunday, February 20, 2011 from 11am until 5pm to the Museum, Planetarium, and Science Gallery.Borders Files For Bankruptcy
Another brick-and-mortar bookstore bites the dust. :/Nine Tools For Managing Your Freelance Design Business
Nathan Weller has whipped up a short list of tools for managing your freelance design business.Antitrust Issues With Apple's Subscription Policies?
The Wall Street Journal explores possible antitrust issues, with experts noting that any such case would hinge on the definition of the market, as that would determine how dominant Apple's position is in it.Google Slaps JCPenny Down
Another example of a company trying to game the SEO system, and the inevitable response from Google. Remember, if it sounds shady to you, it'll sound shady to Google too.Death Cab For Cutie Reveals New Album
Death Cab For Cutie announced on its website today that the band's new album, Codes and Keys, will be released May 31 on Atlantic Records.Imagine A Jump
The vocals of Van Halen's "Jump" overtop of the instruments of John Lennon's "Imagine"Google One Pass
Is Google giving publishers what they want the day after Apple has pissed off so many content distributers?Daily Links
W3C Confirms May 2011 for HTML5 Last Call, Targets 2014 for HTML5 Standard
W3C today extended the charter of the HTML Working Group with clear milestones for HTML5, the cornerstone of W3C's Open Web Platform for application development. In May 2011, the Working Group will advance HTML5 to "Last Call," an invitation to communities inside and outside W3C to confirm the technical soundness of the specification. The group will then shift focus to gathering implementation experience. W3C is developing a comprehensive test suite to achieve broad interoperability for the full specification by 2014, the target date for Recommendation.CSS 3 Backgrounds & Borders was just approved as CR
CSS 3 Backgrounds & Borders specs have changed from Working Draft (WD) to Candidate Recommendation (CR). Next step will be Proposed Recommendation (PR) and finally W3C Recommendation (REC).Apple Unveils Subscription Service in App Store
The processing of payments will be Apple's job and handled within the App Store. Apple will collect 30 percent of the revenue.Coca Cola's Secret Recipe Revealed! ... In 1979
The recipeFluid extract of Coca: 3 drams USP
Citric acid: 3 oz
Caffeine: 1 oz
Sugar: 30 (unclear quantity)
Water: 2.5 gal
Lime juice: 2 pints, 1 quart
Vanilla: 1 oz
Caramel: 1.5 oz or more for color
The secret 7X flavor (use 2 oz of flavor to 5 gals syrup):
Alcohol: 8 oz
Orange oil: 20 drops
Lemon oil: 30 drops
Nutmeg oil: 10 drops
Coriander: 5 drops
Neroli: 10 drops
Cinnamon: 10 drops
Image by Eye Of The Photographer
Preventing Comment Spam
Comment spam is something we have all come to hate. How do you keep it out of your blog? Here are a few of the methods that Visual Lizard uses in our projects.
Akismet.com
If you have ever used WordPress, then you are familiar with Akismet. It is a brilliant, behind-the-scenes, web service that you can feed your comments through. Installing Akismet is a snap if you use WordPress, as there is a dedicated plugin ready to roll. All you need to do is sign up for an account and plugin your details.
If you are using our Catalyst CMS, it is just about that easy as well. We have written a plugin that hooks your site into your Akismet account. We then pass comments, form submissions and the like through the Akismet API and it takes care of the rest.
One of the major advantages to Akismet is that it happens behind the scenes. There is no extra field to fill in on your form in order for a visitor to submit it. This is good for your visitors and good for the health of the web. Since we hooked up Akismet, we have seen spam reduced to almost zero. Regular form submissions come in without issue and we no longer have to weed out spam every morning.
reCaptcha.org
reCaptcha started out as an independent project to digitize books, prior to being acquired by Google. Whenever someone fills in reCaptcha on a website, the data is fed back to their systems. By taking a known word and an unknown word, the data that comes back is gathered and then analyzed to figure out what the unknown word actually is. The words are then returned to the texts that they came from, hence the digitizing.
reCaptcha was our go to method for ages. They deliver a service through their API. We are then able to style, re-align and adjust their forms as we need to in order to get them to fit into any web project. In addition, reCaptcha offers an audio version of their service if your visitors are visually impaired. Thus making their form element completely accessible.
If you can't or don't want to pay for Akismet, then reCaptcha is the way to go. With all the sites we have that use reCaptcha, we see very little comment spam.
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Comment Via Twitter
On our current site, we are using Akismet on the contact form at the bottom. However, on our blog, you will notice that we have hooked into Twitter's API for comments via oAuth. We did this for a few reasons. We wanted people to own the comments they leave behind. While anonymous comments are sometimes insightful, they have been few and far between in the past. By attaching the comments to Twitter, in order to leave a comment, you have to be brief and attach it to a valid twitter account.
Secondly, with the authentication step, oAuth effectively adds a barrier that spam bots are not able to navigate. Eventually they will figure this out, but for now we are a step ahead.
Human Test Questions
A simple question that would be hard for a computer to answer, such as "is fire hot or cold?" or "what is 4 plus 3?". The idea behind a human test question is that you ask and get an answer that someone would have to interpret. We have tried using a few different human test questions in the past and they have worked in preventing robotic comment spam.
While human test questions can eventually be solved by comment bots, if you put a little extra work into your human tests by adding a database of a half dozen questions or so, then you will be able to thwart most of the bots for the near future. If you update your questions every so often, then you should be able to say well ahead of them.
If you don't want to use Akismet or don't like the way reCaptcha looks, then human tests are the best choice.
Naked Forms
Obviously these are the not a good choice anymore. Given the volume of robot spam out there, any naked form will get hit at least once a day if your site has any amount of inbound links. The more inbound links, the more likely you are going to get pulverized by spam.
If, for some reason, you have to go with a naked form, make sure you that you can turn on comment moderation within your CMS or that you have a pretty robust spam filter on your inbox. That is the best advice we can give you.
If you have any other favourites, be sure to leave a comment via Twitter and we will update the post once we have explored them. Happy building!