CAPTCHAs, those images of squiggly letters that are a pain to solve, help digitize books, and are increasingly being cracked by bots, are taking a new approach. Instead of being a still image, CAPTCHAs are now being made into videos of moving text so they're easier for a human to solve but more complicated for a bot with NuCaptcha. NuCaptcha's Basic service is free and still … [Read more...]
Host Your Own URL Shortener with Shorty, YOURLS, or Others
I've been in a domain buying mood lately and decided to purchase 404ts.com to complement my primary but longer domain 404techsupport.com. While thinking about having a short URL for the sake of convenience, what else am I supposed to do with it than setup a URL shortening service? Similar to Bit.ly, TinyURL, Is.Gd, and the dozens of other sites out there that provide URL … [Read more...]
Turning Down Technorati Media and Looking for Ad Networks for Small Sites
If you've visited 404 Tech Support recently, you'll have noticed a few additional ads. One was on the right column and another was on the home page following the most recent article. These ads were provided by Technorati Media. Today, after testing the ads for the past week , I have removed all Technorati Media ads and will not be going back to the service. I'm very … [Read more...]
WordPress 3.0 Final is Available
WordPress 3.0 Final has been released and as the engine behind 404 Tech Support, I'm interested in their progress. Dubbed "Thelonious" it's gone through 3 different release candidate versions so hopefully it's well-polished now and plugins have had time to update. 3.0 has been worked on for half a year and includes "1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements". Big new features … [Read more...]
Google Announces a New Indexing System It Calls Caffeine
Google announced on its main blog and the Google Webmaster Central blog that it has created and implemented a new search index it likes to call Caffeine. The new index moves away from a layered approach to a faster refreshing index that can add new or newly discovered items into search results faster. So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is … [Read more...]