Lots of interesting discoveries today. I spent hours in front of my computer, trying to make my blog do this and display that… I had never worked with a CMS before; it’s crazy what one can do with them. Here are some topics I would want to share with the webdevelopment-interested among my readers.

The coolest project I discovered today is reCAPTCHA. You all know those images in web forms, displaying some distorted letters one has to decrypt in order to prove that one is human, not spambot. Now the reCAPTCHA project combines spam protection with a useful task: digitising books. A lot of libraries are currently making digital copies of their books. A painful task, because computer text recognition is unreliable, and a lot of manpower is needed to fill in undetected words. Now why not just delegate this task to millions of web users out there, by putting these words under web forms to be used as spam protection? A great idea, implemented by the university of Carnegie Mellon as a service freely available to web sites. Discover it on this blog, e.g. by writing a comment!

The practical “Monthly Archives” links known from Blogspot and elsewhere can be added to drupal by simply installing a module. The number of modules available is overwhelming (and the interface to search for them minimalistic), so one can spend hours browsing through them, considering new features…

One last topic related to internet: Today I read (once again) the Gnu Privacy Guard Handbook, a very interesting document explaining principles and practice of cryptography. If anybody wants to write me an encrypted email, just get my public key from any keyserver…

Enough for now… bye bye computer, I’m going jogging :-)