Jason Madigan

Here’s two quick and easy steps you can take to increase your Wordpress sites speed:

Enable Wordpress’s Object Caching

Add define(‘ENABLE_CACHE’, true); to your wp-config.php to enable Wordpress’s built in object caching and Wordpress will begin caching all sorts of database queries resulting in an instantaneous performance boost.

Install WP-Cache 2

WP-Cache is a plugin which serializes and caches posts to disk for quick retrieval. It’s also smart enough to keep serialized data on the disk up to date so it won’t serve stale content.

At work today I finally got my hands on an iPhone. It was everything I’d hoped for. Beautiful design, much smaller than I’d imagined and pretty sturdy. I played around with viewing a movie, playing with the camera and generally poking about the parts of the phone which didn’t require the GSM radio. I want one. I mean I wanted one before but without having held and used one it’s very easy to dismiss purchasing it by saying to yourself “oh I’ll wait, you know firsthand what first gen Apple hardware is like” or “but but 3G!”. I’m very tempted to take the plunge and import one in the hope that the radio will get unlocked quite soon.

Captchas suck. I really don’t think anyone is going to disagree with me here. They suck because they attempt to stop spam bots at the cost of the end user’s experience. How many times have you entered a captcha only to have an error returned because the image presented to you is incomprehensible not only to spam bots, but also to the user?

Surely there must be a better way of differentiating a humans from spam bots with minimal impact to usability. It just so happens that I think I may well have stumbled upon a pretty simple solution which should prove far less prone to user error and still remain effective at preventing automated spam bots from passing as humans. The idea is pretty simple. Instead of relying on a user to comprehend a randomised string embedded in an image, we instead ask the user to do something they’re pretty good at already: clicking. Far less prone to user error but just as effective. Here’s some quickly stitched together mockups (I’ll replace these with nifty JavaScript ones as soon as time allows):

Click the numbers in order 1-4.

Join the dots!

There are many ways of implementing this. The key is using JavaScript to detect mouse clicks on specific portions of the Clickcha and then having the server interpret these clicks to determine if they’re correct.

Edit: It would appear that I’m slightly lysdexic and have a hard time spelling Captcha!