One of the worries I had early on with OpenID as an authentication system was its decentralization, the key feature of the system. I still to this day, don’t understand how a system like OpenID could be considered secure enough to use as a membership system for various sites.
There are many different ways to secure areas of your site that are open to users, and one of the most popular methods for years have been CAPTCHA’s. They are images that have distorted text which you then write in an input field to verify you are a human and not a machine.
One of the worst things about CAPTCHA’s is how inaccessible they are to those with visual impairments. Heck, I am only twenty-five, and while I do wear glass, even I find myself unable to read some of the letters and numbers on the more complex CAPTCHA images.
Recently, I was at the Northern Voice conference in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia Canada, where I was able to meet up with people from a variety of different backgrounds. It got me wondering about how each conference brings in different groups of people, and how the best conferences are the ones that have a blurry line between different groups and specialties.
So, now that the HD DVD versus Blu-ray is basically considered over, with Blu-ray the winner, it made me wonder how people chose one over another. How do you decide you are going to learn PHP over ASP, WordPress over Movable Type, Windows over Linux? What drives your decisions to chose one format over the other?
As a freelancer, you can become an expert in your field, or acquire a respectable amount of skill in multiple fields. Which is better?
So, for a while now, I have been watching Sitepoint, and other places where you can buy and sell sites. I have also watched as numerous sites I know well have been bought and sold, and there is one major thing I have realized: on average, a site will lose up to a third of its traffic after being sold.
I know this is a generalization, but from what I have seen over the last couple of years proves to me that I am right, especially where blogs are concerned.
One of the biggest questions I get pertains to promoting an article online. Once you have written something amazing, it doesn’t really matter until people read it, and the best way to get it read is to promote it on social bookmarking/networking/news sites like Digg, Reddit, and others.
Of course you have already heard this all before, and you want to know what the “secret sauce” is that gets certain people on the front page of sites over and over, and the answer is simply: connections.
Are e-books helpful resources, or just useful to those profiting off them? Why do so many people online spend money on products that promise the world for cheap, and not deliver?
Would you pay to subscribe to a blog, if it was similar in price to purchasing an e-book? Have your say.
If you haven’t heard by now, TinyURL has gone down. The popular URL shortening service went down sometime in the night, and has yet to come back up yet. With so many services depending on the free TinyURL service, I am surprised that it has been down for so long.
Just a few points on why you shouldn’t trust a free service without making sure there are systems in place to deal with service outages.
Update: TinyURL is back up and running with no word excusing the outage.
Today while at work I was browsing my feeds when I stumbled across a very odd headline: You got h4ck3d!
I thought it was a joke. So I went to the website.
As you can see from the image, the hack is legit. The author promptly removed the post within a [...]
