links for 2007-12-03
Continue Reading December 3rd, 2007
Posts filed under 'Blogging'
reCAPTCHA
I just heard of reCAPTCHA. This is a very interesting spin on CAPTCHAs. Accoring to their web site, 60 million captchas are solved every day. reCAPTCHA uses part of the effort to "scan" books.
A reCAPTCHA captcha contains a word that OCR didn’t find a match when scanning books from the Internet Archive. In addition to the word that is not recognized, a successfully scanned word is displayed. The captcha is considered successfully entered if the known word is entered, and then the answer for the unknown word is added to a database. If enough people enter an unknown word with the same answer, then the probability of the answer being correct goes up.
There are several plugins for blogging systems, as well as a PHP api.
Continue Reading November 11th, 2007
Update on Flock blog editor
As I have mentioned before, I have been trying to use the Flock block editor to post to my blogs. Almost everything works, except one major feature. The WYSIWYG editor isn’t really. If you enter newlines in the text editor, they don’t get converted to paragraph tags. (ecto has an option to enable this.)
I think that I will just stick to the web based interface provided by LifeType.
Continue Reading November 4th, 2007
Flock blog editor
In this post, I mentioned that I was looking for a good blog editor for Ubuntu. I saw this article that mentioned Flock, and decided to try it out. This is a browser, based on Firefox code, that is gear towards social networking.
In addition to social network activities, Flock also included a blog editor. This allows you to do offline editing of blog entries.
Continue Reading October 25th, 2007
madKast
I heard about madKast on the last GeekNewsCentral podcast. This looks like a pretty cool way to add a widget to share your posts via email or on social networking sites.
You have to include a javascript in your header, and then the script parses the page to identify the individual posts. Then it places an icon next to each title.
When you click on the icon, a widget appears where you can send the link in an email, or your can post it to various sites.
I found a problem in the way that it detects individual articles. The posts that I have that were submitted directly from del.icio.us, are not marked with the madKast icon. All of these posts have a title similar to “links for 2007-07-29″. I send an email to madKast support about this problem.
I will not be installing this myself. The problem that I have with this is that the javascript is hosted on an external server. There is a chance that, if their server is unresponsive, that page loads could be adversely affected.
If they offered the ability to host the javascript yourself, I would probably install it. In fact, I would probably write a LifeType plugin for it.
Continue Reading August 8th, 2007