We've all seen CAPTCHAs. They are those little images that pop-up with some distorted text. You have to type the text to set up a new account, see an e-mail address, etc. They're designed to differentiate a real human from a computer 'bot'. Computers can't interpret the distorted images as well as humans, so they will fail a CAPTCHA test.
Carnegie-Mellon University has a project relating to CAPTCHAs called reCAPTCHA. Their website explains:
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
Through a simple process, the reCAPTCHA website generates code that you can insert into a webpage that will hide your e-mail address with a reCAPTCHA. Here's an example I built for my e-mail address. Try it out. As a reward, you will get my e-mail address and help the Internet Archive build it's library.
They've also build plug-ins for Wordpress, MediaWiki and phpBB. There's also a fully defined api and a php library. For more details on reCAPTCHA, visit http://recaptcha.net
I ran across a blog entry from Jeff Atwood at Coding Horrors this morning talking about my favorite programming language, javascript. Traditionally, javascript has the reputation of being a 'toy' language. But that has changed:
Regardless of your original feelings towards the language, JavaScript has come a long way since the bad old days of 1995. We've got CPU power to burn on the client; so much power, in fact, that even an interpreted, dynamic language like JavaScript can be a credible client-side development environment. The language has been standardized...so there's now a reasonable expectation of compatibility across browsers.
Jeff goes on to call MS Silverlight, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex and Sun JavaFX "pretenders to the throne". He says (emphasis from the orginal article):
JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. Ignore it at your peril.
Microsoft threw down the gantlet last month by first declaring the browser wars over, then a few days later, announcing that they were challenging Flash for the crown of plug-in king. The browser wars have morphed into the plug-in wars. And it's a war certain to heat up when Microsoft releases the next version of Internet Explorer.
Do you remember the days of websites announcing "This site best viewed on <browser>"? And if you did want to be a conscience website builder, you had to go to great lengths to support (or avoid) all of the different proprietary HTML extensions. We're heading down that road again. But this time it's going to be the great plug-in war.
The nature of web has shifted. Content is more dynamic everyday. It is tempting to grab onto Flash as the best was to make the web experience more dynamic. But if you want to avoid the same kind of painful experiences of the browser wars, avoid relying on plug-ins to provide dynamic content. Javascript has evolved into a powerful and ubiquitous programming language. Every major browser installs with javascript running and ready to go.
So make your site immune to the coming plug-in wars. Don't forget that javascript remains a powerful choice for building a rich-content web site.
Ken Heutmaker recently started a site called sizzleWithoutFlash. It provides links to resources and libraries to help web developers build rich sites using Javascript.
Labels: javascript, web design
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When you building a web page, it makes sense to think about how the search engines will show it in their listings. A well crafted listing can make a big difference in how many clicks your listing gets. For example, if you were presented with these listings, would you automatically pick the first listing or would you pick one of the other two?
The sad thing is that the owner of the top listing has control of what Google shows shows in their listing. The top line of the comes from the <title> tag. This is the tag that sets the text that shows in the title bar at the top of the browser and in the tabs of a browser that has tabs. In the case of the first listing, the page title wasn't set by the web programmer, so Google refers to their site as "Untitled Document".
Another mistake some sites make in the <title> tag is loading it with keyword...only. Having good keywords in your title is important, but it is more important to set the title of the page to something that looks good in the SERPS (Search engine results pages). At minimum, it should be the name of your company. Ideally, it should be something that people want to click on.
Google only shows the first 65 characters, so make sure that it fits. I think the most compelling titles have a tag line and the name of the company. Google lists my blog as "Modern Webspace, Inc. | Helpful Tips for Webspace Owners" and my corporate site as "Modern Webspace, Inc. - Sensible Internet Solutions".
The rest of your listing comes from one of two places. If you have a meta description tag, sometimes the search engine will use that for the body of your listing in the SERPs. When it doesn't use the meta description tag, it uses the first few lines of content. It is important to have a well written meta description tag and to place a good description of your business at the beginning of your content.
As for meta keywords, most search engines ignore them. Keywords come from the contents of website and the text in links to your site. It doesn't hurt to use meta keywords, but it doesn't really do anything for your listing.
When you are designing your website, one of the first things you want to do is decide what you want your Google listing to look like. A top 10 position with a well designed Google listing can be more effective than a #1 placement that is not well designed.
Labels: SEO, SERP, web design
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