Tag Archives: Off-Topic

“Paper Airplane”

I’m excited to be seeing new music from AKUS coming soon.

Boo on there not being any harmonies in this track. Otherwise, great stuff.

Body Image Jokes = Not Funny

A GraphJam from today.

As a father of two girls, I unfortunately don’t find this to be funny. I worry that they will someday stop listening to me when I tell them they are beautiful or pretty and they will end up feeling like this.

(Their future boyfriends/spouses are already in trouble. They just don’t know it yet.)

CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates

Harry Brignull on CAPTCHAs and conversion rates:

Users were directed to the sign-up form direct from the homepage before they could interact with the product. As you can see, there was a CAPTCHA at the bottom of the form (powered by reCAPTCHA). With this design, they had a conversion rate of roughly 48%. They then removed the CAPTCHA, and it boosted the conversion rate up to 64%. In conversion rate lingo, that’s an uplift of 33.3%! They replaced the CAPTCHA with honeypot fields and timestamp analysis, which has apparently proven to be very effective at preventing spam while being completely invisible to the end user.

In order for CAPTCHAs to be useful and/or effective, they have to render text in a way that requires a human to stop and examine it closely (in order to prevent machines from reading it).

Slowing down a registration or commenting process makes it feel like more work for the user or potential user. It’s an increase in cognitive load.

rStat.us and “Decentralized Twitter”

ReadWriteCloud:

rStat.us is an OStatus-based microblogging service built by Steve Klabnik and others using Ruby, Sinatra and MongoDB. Because it uses OStatus, it’s compatible with Identi.ca and StatusNet microblogs. In order to follow someone from Identi.ca, just paste the ATOM feed from their profile into rStat.us. Theoretically this should work both ways, but I was unable to subscribe to my own rStat.us account from Identi.ca account.

Yeah, good luck with that.

WordPress and other publishing platforms work well decentralized specifically because they don’t require a single locus to function with each other. There are pingbacks and comments—and if you want to follow another site you generally do it with RSS. It’s the language of publishing platforms. You can do neat stuff with a single locus (like the social features on WordPress.com), but it’s not necessary for the ecosystem to function.

Social services like Twitter and Facebook are popular because they focus people’s attention in the same area. It’s a single place where people can find their friends and people they want to Internet-stalk, and that makes it easy to connect.

Pasting an Atom feed? It’s not going to work because that’s not the language of social services. You’ve already made it too hard.

Updates to Sharedaddy Tutorials (Now with More Jetpack!)

I just updated my two tutorial posts on adding custom sharing services to Sharedaddy, which is now bundled with Jetpack for WordPress:

These are by far the most popular posts here, so I thought I should give them some long overdue attention.

I’ve added the missing variables and have added Tumblr as a sharing service to the list. This weekend I hope to go through the rest of the requests and add them into the post, as well as clean up some of the markup, which doesn’t play as nice with my new theme so it looks kind of ugly right now.