#15 So, do you think CAPTCHA is getting annoying?

CAPTCHA, that notoriously annoying combination of numbers and letters, is getting harder and more annoying. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a necessary evil, but the lesser of two evils, for any web site owner that has some kind of HTML form on their web site, where HTML form data is saved to a database, flat file, or sent via email. The bigger evil I am talking about is receiving spambot data from these forms. So, Captcha seems like a good alternative, even though your visitors don’t like filling them out.

A lot of my web site visitors ask me to remove these images, and I professionally decline explaining why. Here’s the real prevalent problem: While we web developers and graphic designers attempt to make it harder for spambots to read these things, we seem to make it just a bit more difficult for human beings to read them as well, which defeats the entire purpose of having any HTML form at all. So, the spambots win and we constantly seem to lose. Unfortunately, as long as we have spabots filling out forms, we must have CAPTCHA until a better trend comes along.

In this podcast, I will tell you about some of the cool tricks web designers are using to make CAPTCHA easier or better yet, alternatives to deter the spambots. We will also talk about the security exploits of CAPTCHA no matter what web development language (I use PHP and ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET on my sites) you are using. We also talk about some technologies that may help CAPTCHA development like AJAX.

#14 Should you Web Designers REST on the job?

Sorry about not podcasting this. My microphone is in another office. Once I retrieve it, I will surely start the podcasts again, but for now, you can read my blog posts.

So, the question is: Should you web designers REST on the job? I think so, but I am not talking about the type of REST where you sleep.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a very cool and easy to use technology and is used on Amazon’s affiliate program.

I was waiting for something like this, because in the old days, Amazon’s affiliate program was very clunky and full of flaws, but thanks to REST, the program has come a long way. When you added a book, you had to get all the garbage that came with it, all designed by Amazon. Each link resulted in an HTML <IFRAME> tag. Can you imagine little IFrames on a web page for each book? That is just ludicrous! That’s not at all what I wanted in an affiliate program. Plus, you had to add each one. That’s not good for SEO either.

Now, with REST, you simply throw over an URL, loaded with some GET name/value pairs and Amazon gives you back an XML file. This XML file contains all types of cool information about the books including cover images, reviews, retail price, and more. What you do with that XML is totally up to you.

I use PHP’s DOM methods at the Web Design Store to parse the XML, but you can use any language that you want. PHP has a cool function called GET_FILE_CONTENTS that will retrieve XML data from a URL.

Another REST application is Twitter’s API, You can visit my Twitter page at http://twitter.com/podcastwhoswho – With the Twitter API, you can send them a simple URL of the Twitter ID and they will send you back your comments…of course in XML, but hey, a little PHP or ASP or even XSLT can go a long way combined with SAX or DOM technologies.

Amazon’s web page has a great explanation of how to work with their REST API and they give you PHP examples as well. As a side note, if you are a SOAP whiz, then Amazon works with SOAP as well.

See you guys next time!
Bruce