reCAPTCHA

Here's a great example of synergy on the Internet: You know those CAPTCHA forms that make you read some distorted text and enter it to prove you're human and not a spambot? Well, the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon has come up with a way to put your effort (and that of millions of other users) to beneficent use.

Here's how it works: You're asked to enter two words to pass the test. The image of the first one is generated from a known word and you must enter it correctly to pass. The second one is a mildly-distorted image of a word that could not be interpreted by an OCR scanner. The assumption is that if you got the first word right, you probably got the second one right, too. Word by word, reCAPTCHA is digitizing pre-digital-era books for the Internet Archive's library.

Best of all, you can drop their widget into your website and use it for free. Everybody wins!

Save the Pixel

In my online search for help in building my first website, I came across a real gem of a book:

Save the Pixel - The Art of Simple Web Design by Ben Hunt.

Its central theme is that you need to manage the user's attention as your most precious resource. Every pixel on your page competes for this attention. One quote:

Likelihood of success is proportional to amount of visitor attention, divided by the amount of stuff they have to look through to get what they need next.

With the bloody 2:1 exchange rate of the Dollar for the Pound the price of this e-book was around $30, but I consider it a good value, nonetheless.

The website on which I found the book:

http://webdesignfromscratch.com

may be known to many of you, but was new to me. There's a wealth of information here, as well --distilled wisdom and best practices. The text is enhanced by many links to websites that help to illustrate principles of good design (and egregious violations of these).