People seem obsessed with captcha these days.

Small web sites that I know couldn’t possibly get more than a few enquiry form submissions a week come looking for it.

I, with 13 years experience of the Internet and decent eyesight have to repeatedly re-attempt registration on websites where I want to do scary things like buy products.

Try signing up for a windows live account. Only a blind person can do it at the first attempt. Not because they can hear the audio (their hearing is many factors better than the sighted, but not that good), no, they can deal with captcha easily because any Internet literate person with sight difficulties are aware of all the tools and plugins that can defeat captcha easily.

In no particular order, these are the reasons I really, really do not want to put captcha on your website:

• You don’t need it. Have you had more than 1 spam submission in the last 2 weeks? Oh I see, all the OTHER sites have it. Like what, Google? Microsoft? Ebay? I admire your self confidence, but I’m not sure your site or service is quite there yet.
• How dare you put the onus on the person you want most to interact with you: a potential customer, collaborator or Internet stalker, and make them jump through an extra hoop simply to register or contact you. Do shops take fingerprints at their doors lest a shoplifter gain entry?
• It is lazy to use captcha. If you really have a problem with spammy signups, contact form submissions etc, a bit of imagination on the part of you and your developer can solve this problem without sticking it to the visitor. Email verification. Spam Filtering. Bad Behaviour. Akismet. It is your problem, so put a bit of effort in.

I have lately been doing quite a bit of work using the SilverStripe CMS, which also has a built in development framework, Sapphire. This is the open source child of SilverStripe, a local company here in Wellington.

Version 2.3.0 of SilverStripe comes with a stable version of ModelAdmin, a really handy new tool I have been playing with in the CVS version prior to release. You can see a video of Ingo Schommer from SilverStripe giving an overview of ModelAdmin here. He also has the bones of the presentation up on Slideshare which isn’t as long but you don’t get to have Ingo’s germanic voice caress your ears.

Issues:

HTMLText fields

Modeladmin does not seem to like HTMLText dataobject fields at the moment and their corresponding form field types, HtmlEditorField. In my local WAMP this causes an page to pretened to load for eternity (though I gave up after about 90 secs so cannot fully confirm the eternity thing…).

I don’t see this as a major issue: html fields are best suited to the Site Content tab where all that stuff currently takes place anyway. There seems to be a bug report in for this issue anyway.

Scaffolding

ModelAdmin makes it super easy to give your data a CRUD (Create, Read, Update Delete – thanks Ingo!) interface.  If you have a dataobject with defined relationships (has_one, has_many or many_many), ModelAdmin will create these as drop down lists in your create/edit forms right off the bat.

This is super but right away I noticed a problem: these drop down lists for component dataobjects have no sorting on them. Thus my list of 2,500 New Zealand towns was not in alphabetical order. Far from ideal.

You can work around this by defining your own form via a getCMSFields function for the dataobject.  This allows you to populate your drop down fields via DataObject::get, allowing you a much greater level of control. 

Tip 1: make sure you define it as a new fieldset: $fields = new FieldSet();
Tip 2: use fields->push: $fields->push(new DropdownField(‘MyDataID’,'My Data’,$MyArray->toDropDownMap(‘ID’, ‘Name’)));
Tip 3: See I used  MyDataID as the field name where the field is called MyData. This had me confused for a bit as ModelAdmin was not capturing the input when I was calling the field MyData.

Assuming you avoid the pitfalls I made above, you can create a dataobject, set it up in ModelAdmin, and in 5mins have a back end administration area for your new data object. Fantastic!

Quite often when I encounter these types of “one size fits all” dataobject management tools, they always lack just enough to put you off using them, but I think ModelAdmin passes with flying colours. It is already being tried out in two websites under development.

I see back at home that the Irish Government have recently conducted a test of an emergency broadcast system for Radio & TV that relays urgent messages in the event of a national disaster, terrorist incident or property crash (too late for the latter).

A quote from the government press release [1] is a bit worrying:

The Government Task Force on Emergency Planning considers that in the event of an emergency, broadcast media will be the most efficient vehicle for the transmission of emergency messages to the public.

Really? My problem is that, like a growing proportion of people out there in this day and age, I rarely use either medium. Sure I am the exception in not watching much tv (an hour or two a week), but in this day and age, how many people actually watch their terrestrial broadcasters? A fair chunk yes, but a reducing proportion in most western countries when you have so many other crap satellite channels to flick through.

So what is left? Well the two communication mediums I use most are Internet and mobile phone. An Internet based emergency broadcast would be technically difficult, though it could be done.

An emergency broadcast via mobile phones would make more sense. This could easily be done via SMS to every phone in the country. That would have a far higher penetration level, and I am pretty sure that you could geographically target these messages by only alerting phones registered to base stations in particular areas. This might be a more costly implementation than just relaying a simple message over TV and Radio, but ultimately more effective which is what you need in the event of an emergency right?

This idea of a TV & Radio broadcast seems to be rooted in the 1950’s. Technology has advanced a bit since then. Don’t have a mobile phone? Well, technology does exist to send an automated message to landlines too. There seems to be a lack of any real forethought in this.

And lastly, the department seemed delighted that all the broadcasters were able to carry out the test at short notice in the early hours of the morning:

The timing of the exercise was deliberately chosen to test the response times of the broadcasters. Most stations are unmanned in the early ours of the morning and it was considered an excellent simulation of an emergency situation where stations would have to react quickly in unusual circumstances.

Eh yeah, well done. But not many people are going to get an emergency message if their tv or radio is switched off and they are asleep are they? If it so important you have to take over the airwaves to relay a message, then maybe go the extra step and wake up the recipients?

[1] Government press release on the broadcast

The first time I implemented a commenting system for a website was way back in 2003, the same year that the Wordpress blogging software project started. Blogging technology has come a long way since then, and the ability to comment on blog posts are, in my humble opinion, one of the key factors for the success of blogging as a communications medium.

It allows blog readers to engage in a way that was really never possible before. Commenting has even made it out of the blogosphere proper, with many sites allowing visitors the ability to comment on web pages of all shapes and sizes.

To put it into perspective, that site I mentioned above, DavidMcWilliams.ie (which is now running on Wordpress), has over 8,000 user contributed comments on some 500 content pages. Byte for byte, the readers of the site have generated more content than the original author!

All well and good, but what are the benefits of having comments on your website?

I think first and foremost, allowing visitors to comment gives them a form of ownership of a little part of your site, and engenders a sense of community over time. Now that their own thoughts are part of your page, they will be more likely to revisit that page again to what others make of their comment, respond to replies directed at their comments, and as I have seen on a number of sites, form alliances and sparring partnerships with other vocal readers.

All this translates to repeat visits and more content on your site, some of which may generate even more traffic.

The second benefit, which may or may not be applicable (it very much depends on the subject matter of the original content) is that quite often readers will contribute new facts or suggestions that the author may not have been aware of.

So on the plus side we have more traffic, a more loyal readership and increasing your own knowledge.

On the minus side, you will of course need to keep an eye on who is posting what. In general, this has never been a major issue, though if the topic is a particularly contentious one, you may see tempers flaring. Of particular annoyance is comment spam, but there are are ways to alleviate this.

There is also the possibility that you may be proven completely wrong in your assertions and made to look a fool by a more intelligent reader, but the last time I checked, there is still plenty of room on the Internet for crackpots, nutjobs and people who are just plain lying, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much

So how has this worked for the case study I mentioned previously?

Well at the moment, the more recent articles on the site are generating an average of 70+ comments. An October article smashed our previous best with 184 comments contributed to it. This however, correlates directly to the subject matter which is generally quite long articles relating to the economy (and this of course has been a hot topic lately).

The site has a core group of approximately 20-30 readers who regularly contribute comments and opinions, some of them of extremely high quality and almost worthy of a blog post of their own!

The length and complexity of the original content will have a direct bearing on the level of debate that is going to take place within the comments. An article pushing for an end to capitalism leaves a bit more room for people to give their 2 cents worth than say, a two line blog post saying your cat has the flu.

In my next post I will be taking a look at some of the many plugins and features available within Wordpress to handle commenting, and which ones I have found particularly useful.

For the past month now I have been plagued by a minor issue that has been grating at me to the point where it has become really irritating.

Every time I use a file open dialogue box (attaching a file, opening a file) on my Windows XP laptop, the files and folders are ordered by the last modified date. This is intensely annoying if it happens
every single time you go to open a file or folder! My only solution in folders with large numbers of files has been to right-click and re-order by name, but this ordering is lost the next time, and it defaults back to last modified.

I finally found the solution in a Logical Tips article written by Susan Daffron, who also had to endure lots of aggravation before finding the cure!

What did we do wrong? Apparently we were holding down the control key when closing a Windows Explorer window….. Serves us right so.