WordPress plugin: Invisible Captcha

Posted on Monday, June 20, 2011 by marek

I have mentioned in previous blog post that we were getting a lot of spam for ALTASO WordPress blog. Since August 2010 until February 2011 we received about 1500 spam comments. Since “Invisible Captcha” installation amount of spam comments went down dramatically. There are still some spam comments going through but now it is much easier to manage them. Our number is about 5-10 spams a month.

This blog post is about Invisible Captcha WordPress plugin we are using and are really happy for now. This plugin is smart invisible captcha for wordpress comments. More information about this plugin you can find here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invisible-captcha/

Plugin is written by Andrey Sorvin and is really good and free anti spam solution. Visitors of your website don’t need to enter letters and numbers, because captcha is not visible. Author claims that this small plugin automatically 100% protects your website from spam in comments … we thing it is somewhere around 98% :)

Installation
1. Download plugin zip file.
2. Upload file invisible-captcha.zip to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory and decompress all files from archive.
3. Add & activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress admin screens.
4. Configure settings in WordPress menu Plugins –> Invisible Captcha
5. Relax and forget about spam in your blog.

When writing this post (June 2011) there is Version 0.6.2 available which was last updated in December 2010. This version requires WordPress Version: 2.0.2 or higher and is compatible up to: 3.0.5 WP version.
At this date this plugin had 14,705 downloads.

ALTASO LTD. – Alberta Software company strongly recommend this plugin if you can not use Akismet for any reason.

This blog post has been written by Marek – Web Developer in Calgary.

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WordPress comments & spam

Posted on Sunday, January 30, 2011 by marek

We have been running this blog powered by WordPress for couple of months now. After couple of weeks we started to receive spamming comments from people who probably things that they are going to have some linking from this site to theirs. Unfortunately for them this is not happening because all comments are moderated and most of the spam comments are deleted.

We do have plenty of spam comments for example:

  • Wow – this is the best article i’ve read in ages!
  • This website is great. I am gonna put this in my bookmarks before I lose the link, I don’t think I’ll ever find my way back here again otherwise!
  • Great article here, and a valuable reference. Prior to reading this, ….
  • I usually don’t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful …
  • I am not a person who is easily delighted but I have to say your work blew me away. So much ideas and relevant details that you put into it made me see your point of view. Thanks for communicating your reasonable inputs.
  • Well … all I can say is, wow. This is an impressive collection of resources, thank you for taking the time to put everything together.

Recently we have more than 50 spam comments every week. It is getting hard to find real comments in this list of other comments, so we have decided to review some options how to stop all those comments or at least most of them.

WordPress is coming with Akisment plugin installed by default. “Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and track-back spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Click the “Activate” link to the left of this description, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key.”

When following the steps in description above, we find out that Akisment is free only for personal blogs with multiple limitations as well. Because this is small business blog we would have to pay $5 every month for Akismet API key and usage of this service. Price might be reasonable because will save time going through spam comments. But we would like to find a free solution.

We have decided to search WordPress plugins for two relevant keywords: “spam” and “captcha”. Both those keywords returns multiple result of available plugins. After reviewing and reading about few of them we have decided to try Invisible Captcha – Smart invisible captcha protects your blog from spam comments. We are going to use it for some time and see if number of spam comments will decrease.

WordPress plugin page for invisible captcha is here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invisible-captcha/

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Drupal 7 has been released

Posted on Monday, January 10, 2011 by marek

Drupal 7.0 has been officially released on January 5th 2011. After more than three years of development, Drupal 7.0 is officially available. The latest release of the open source content management system (CMS) should feature a revamped admin interface, more flexibility options for content and more optimized code.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert estimates that approximately 1,000 people contributed to Drupal 7. The Drupal community members were holding 326 worldwide “release parties” in 96 countries on Friday, January 7, 2011.

From drupal.org website: http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0

Friendly and powerful: Drupal 7

We are proud to present to you our best work yet – Drupal 7, the friendly and powerful content management platform for building nearly any kind of website: from blogs and micro-sites to collaborative social communities.

More information about parties can be available: http://www.drupal7releaseparty.org

Video below is Drupal 7 introduction from Lullabot.

Drupal 7 Marketing Video from Lullabot on Vimeo.

ALTASO LTD. – Alberta Software will finally start working with Drupal 7 soon. We are going to get familiar with it while working on www.marekpisch.com website.

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Drupal 2010 retrospective

Posted on Tuesday, January 4, 2011 by marek

Today I was reading interesting article written by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert about 2010 retrospective and 2011 predictions for popular Open Source CMS. It was his first blog post of 2011.

Year 2010 seems to be a good for Drupal growth. Drupal grew by multiple aspects such as : the number of active community mebers; the number of visitors to drupal.org site; the number of sites powered by Drupal; and the number of Drupal related events and meet-ups.

2010 was the year in which Drupal achieved noticeably better usability, design, accessibility and marketing. Unfortunately Drupal 7 has not been released in 2010 but it is getting very close to be fully released in 2011. Release has been delayed for good reasons and Drupal team didn’t compromise on quality of final product.

Relative to the bigger market, 2010 was also the year where Dries felt core development of Joomla slowed down a bit. As part of that, he noticed that the Joomla community started to expand to Drupal.

At the same time it looks like WordPress, on the other hand, seems to be accelerating. It is growing from a blogging platform into a full content management system (CMS). WordPress has a long way to go to compete with Drupal on the high-end complex systems. But it will be string competition in the low-end of the market (smaller websites).

Full article (blog post) is available here:

http://buytaert.net/drupal-2010-retrospective-and-2011-predictions

ALTASO LTD. in 2010 helped to build following Drupal sites (Drupal 5 and Drupal 6):
www.avenuecalgary.com
www.avenueedmonton.com
www.wineaccess.ca
www.upmagazine.com
www.momentum.org
www.sprungarenas.com
www.etrabant.com
www.calgaryeconomicdevelopment.com

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Drupal Xmas Song

Posted on Sunday, December 26, 2010 by marek

Here are some lyrics from that Drupal song.

You know Joomla and WordPress, Magento and Tango,
Radiant, SilverStripe, iWeb and Mambo.
But do you recall
the most awesome framework of all?

Drupal the website framework
has some very agile code.
And if you ever used it,
you would say the others blow.

All of the other frameworks
could not understand its fame.
They thought because it was free,
surely it had to be lame.

Then one cold December eve,
big O came to say:
Drupal with your code so tight,
won’t you run the nation site?

All of us helped to make it
grow in popularity,
d-r-u-p-a-l dot org
you’re about community.

Drupal the website framework
has some very agile code.
And if you ever used it,
you would say the others blow.

All of the other frameworks
could not understand its fame.
They thought because it was free,
surely it had to be lame.

Then one cold December eve,
big O came to say:
Drupal with your code so tight,
won’t you run the nation site?

All of us helped to make it
grow in popularity,
d-r-u-p-a-l dot org
you’re about community.

Drupal the website framework
has some really awesome code.
And you should really use it,
to reduce your bandwidth load.

All of the other frameworks
used to laugh and mock its claims
“because the source was open,
security had to be lame!”

Then one cold Decembers Eve,
Barak came to say:
Drupal, with your code so tight,
whitehouse dot gov needs you tonight!

Then how the others loved it,
as they shouted out with Dries
d-r-u-p-a-l dot org,
you’re about community!

We are the community!

Thanks to everyone in the Drupal Community for your hard work!

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Drupal 7.0 second release candidate is out

Posted on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 by marek

On December 11th 2010 the second release candidate of Drupal 7 has been released by Drupal community.

It looks like there are still known issues that needs to be working on fixing, but everybody is getting confident that released code is stable enough for wider testing by the community.

Since the last release candidate in November 2010, there have been fixes for upgrade path bugs, improved styling in the default “Bartik” theme, numerous bug fixes and improvements to strings, and fixed a critical bug preventing default Views from working. For the full list of changes please follow the link at the bottom of this article and read full Drupal announcement.

How people can help test the release candidate?
ALTASO LTD. – Alberta Software has decided to start testing Drupal 7 for our new sites and projects. We are going to start by installing a new Drupal 7 site. We believe that it is little bit too early for testing upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, but we will do it in the future for sure.

Our first Drupal 7 project probably will be website about Canadian Citizenship Test running at www.citizenshiptestcanada.com.

When setting up a new site, developers can use the development module to generate some test data (content, users, etc) to help start testing quickly. As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running release candidates on a live site. Also, always be sure to make a backup of your data before performing any upgrade or starting testing.

When will Drupal 7 get released?
Drupal 7.0 final will be released after:
(a) there are no more critical bugs and
(b) they’ve had at least one release candidate without adding any more to the list.

When will that be? Well, it depends entirely on you and community! The more you chip in and help out, the faster 7.0 gets released.

Read full “Drupal 7.0 RC 2 Released” announcement at: http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-rc2

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20 possible iPad competitors

Posted on Monday, November 15, 2010 by marek

The iPad is a tablet computer designed and developed by Apple. The iPad was released in April 2010, and sold 3 million of the devices in 80 days. It is particularly marketed as a platform for audio and visual media such as books, periodicals, movies, music, and games, as well as web content.

Now, almost at the end of 2010, TechRepublic posted an article (images) about possible future iPad competitors. They’ve some up with impressive list of 20 devices:
- Samsung Galaxy Tab: 7 inches tablet, Android OS
- BlackBerry PlayBook: 7 inches tablet, QNX OS
- Cisco Cius: 7 inches
- HP Slate 500: initially supposed to be Windows 7 OS, now might be using webOS
- Toshiba Libretto: dual 7 inches screens, Windows 7 OS
- Viewsonic ViewPad 100: 10 inches tablet, Windows 7 and Android OS
- ASUS Eee Pad: multiple tablets from 9 to 12 inches with different OS
- Lenovo U1 Hybrid: Wndows7 and Linux OS
- Archos 10: 10 inches tablet, Android OS
- Toshiba Folio 100: 10 inches tablet, Android OS

And other 10 tablets are: LG Android Tablet, MSI WinPad 100, Notion Ink Adam, NEC LifeTouch, ExoPC Slate, Motion Computing J3500, Viliv X70 EX, EnTourage eDGe, Nefonie WeTab, Augen Gentouch78.

Slideshow images and more information are available:

http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-13416_11-476550.html

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