Although I spend way too much time on the Internet, my free time is a fixed quantity. I have observed that as I spend more time following people via Twitter (my handle is @burke_eric), I spend far less time using Google Reader and following blogs in general.

Rather than spending my time wading through hundreds of blog posts, I am happy to let the people I follow on Twitter find the good stuff.

For the record, I tried Twitter a long time ago and hated it. After deleting my account and avoiding Twitter for several months, I returned. I find it much more engaging now, largely because they hit critical mass and there are more interesting people to follow.

Now if they can just resolve their scalability issues…

Well I guess my tech support request made it through to Twitter after all, because I’m back in action.

And so it begins. I mentioned some issues with reCAPTCHA, and received a this comment:

Have you tried Asirra?

So I tried it. Here are the results of my usability study:

• The images are really tiny until you hover over them.
• I found it awkward because I really can’t quickly identify the correct images without hovering over each one. It requires too much mouse precision, which slows me down.
• After selecting a few cats, I made the mistake of clicking the “Adopt Me” link, which took me to a different web site.
• When I finally clicked “Score Test”, it told me I’m a bot. (I’m not, unless of course I’m a replicant and simply don’t realize it. Hey…what’s that origami Unicorn doing on my desk?)

I suspect it thinks I’m a bot because I clicked that “Adopt Me” link, making it forget the previous selections.

In summary, this is another CAPTCHA that tries accomplishing a “mission” — adopting pets — which detracts from its usability as a CAPTCHA. In particular, the “Adopt Me” links get in the way.

Holy balls. I had a Twitter account in the past, but I deleted it. (due to being boring and having nothing to write about) Now I decide I’d like to try Twitter again, so I just tried creating a new account.

First, they tell me my Email is already taken. Grr…

So then I click the “forgot” link, enter my Email…and they say:

Oh Snap! We couldn’t find you!

So let me get this straight:

1. According to their database, my Email address is already taken.
2. According to their database, they can’t find my Email address.

Impressive. I blame Rails. (not really, just seems like easy trolling these days…)

I really love the concept of reCAPTCHA, and currently use it on this blog. But I grow weary of this kind of comment:

Also, the captch is super hard to read.. I had to reload 3 times before I got one I could actually make out.

Observation #1

First, people who say this simply do not understand how reCAPTCHA works. One of the words should be legible; the other may or may not be. That’s because one of the two words is taken from some scanned book, and the OCR software could not read it.

People who understand this know they do NOT have to keep hitting reload. Instead, just type your best guess into reCAPTCHA. I’ve left a lot of comments on my own blog, and can only remember a single incident where I had to reload the CAPTCHA. Every other time, even if I couldn’t really read one of the words with confidence, I just typed my best guess and made it right through.

Observation #2

Observation #1 does not matter. It is unrealistic to expect people to research how your CAPTCHA works before they “get it”. I have received a large number of complaints about reCAPTCHA, and it’s making my blog suck. My own blog content is bad enough, now I have to deal with extraneous technical complexity.

This brings me to a larger point about software usability. As technologists, we have deep technical understanding of how our own software works. It is far too easy to get defensive and perhaps even angry at “dumb users” who can’t figure things out. All too often, we are blind to the usability flaws in our own software.

In Summary

reCAPTCHA is a brilliant idea, but fatally flawed. It presents hopelessly garbled text to users who generally don’t really understand what reCAPTCHA is trying to accomplish. Even if I were to include some detailed educational material explaining the concept, most people would not read my explanation. And who could blame them? We’re all overloaded with technical noise.

At this point, reCAPTCHA damages the usability of my blog, as evidenced by numerous comments and complaints from visitors. Explaining how reCAPTCHA works is not my concern. Making my blog easy for people to use — and blocking spammers — are my only concerns.

Sooner or later, when I get around to it, I’ll have to find another solution. That makes me sad, because I’m a big fan of the research behind reCAPTCHA. I really do think it is a great concept, but “not annoying customers” is a bigger concern for most web site owners.

…is Twitter worth my time? What’s the point if I have to login and check a web site for updates? The last time I tried Twitter, I tried following via RSS, which sucked because it lagged about 8-12 hours, which seemed to defeat the whole point.

Breaking news from our friends at CNN…

Actress Elizabeth Taylor urged voters in next week’s Democratic primaries to back Hillary Clinton’s White House run, saying in a statement released Friday that the New York senator was “not a flibbertijibbet.”

I tried looking that up, and Google suggests that maybe I meant Flibbertigibbet. I find it amusing that the Wikipedia article already mentions the CNN article about Elizabeth Taylor.

I’m still not sure how this news translates into anything meaningful…like war, education, the economy, the environment, energy policy, health care, etc. Add my stupid blog to the meaningless echo chamber, I guess. We’re doomed.

I’ve probably deleted about 3 comments from this blog due to either extreme profanity or blatantly stupid personal attacks. I think two of those deleted comments were from this guy.

He’s all riled up again and now I’m having some fun with it. Go let him know what you think.

I guess his logic goes something like this:

• USA SUCKS!

It’s deep, I know.

Meme time, via Bill:

history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head

Hmm…

'history' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

C:\Users\Eric>

After writing Best. Comment. Ever., I realized comment permalinks were not working on my blog. Clicking the link brought up the page, but failed to scroll to the comment.

Jörg offers this advice:

Firefox does right, and so does safari: You anchors name (”…#comment-7155″) contains a “-”, which is an invalid name. Try something like “#comment7155″, it will work.

While his suggestion served as a catalyst for me to finally investigate the problem, I was not convinced “-” was the cause. So I researched the HTML specification, which has this to say:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens (”-”), underscores (”_”), colons (”:”), and periods (”.”)

Dashes are frequently used in URLs, so this cannot be the problem.

The Solution

While my heavily customized WordPress theme defined links, it failed to define anchors or IDs. So the links were going nowhere. I had to edit comments.php and add this ID to a <div> tag:

<div id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>" class="comment">

And that fixed the problem. I also re-learned some things about HTML that I probably knew at one point, but forgot:

• On the receiving end of an anchor-type link, you omit the # character
• You don’t have to link to <a name=”something”>. As my theme shows, you can link to <div id=”something”>

I suspect WordPress works fine out of the box, but I must have screwed it up when creating this theme.