facetofcathy

IFTTT (If This Then This) is a service that lets you make recipes to do automated tasks on the internet.

One thing you can do with it is to have it notice new entries on an RSS feed and then make a bookmark on a service like Pinboard or Delicious that links to that feed item.

I used this trick to make the collection of bookmarks for the White Collar newsletter less of an onerous task. When we lost one of our volunteers and couldn't replace her, this automation was the only thing that kept the construction of the newsletter possible in any sort of reasonable amount of time.

You can use this on any RSS feed, an LJ or DW comm, the AO3 feeds, Pinboard tag feeds, ff.net feeds -- whatever you like.

Here's a brief overview of how to do it.

Make your IFTTT account first and have your bookmarking service account info handy too.

Now set up your bookmarking account on IFTTT by activating a channel for it. Hit the Channels link up top and find the icon for your service. Click it and follow the instructions to activate it, so IFTTT knows who you are on that service.

Next make your recipe. You'll need the URL of the feed you want to draw from, so get that opened up in another tab.

Start with the Create link on IFTTT and follow the steps. You can take everything on a feed, or just the items that match a keyword. You can have them make private or public bookmarks too. Make the choices that work for you, but don't worry, you can edit this later.

Once you've said what goes where (the This and the That), you can configure the bookmark a bit. There are preset ingredients available for the various fields on the bookmark, so you can use those to make custom tags and to decide how much of the feed entry you want in the description field of your bookmark.

What I did for the newsletter was to put a tag called "needstags" on each bookmark and I set them up to be private. That way, I could go through them quickly and fix up any formatting issues and add the specific pairing tags we used to assemble the newsletter (I never could figure out how to automate that part) before making them public.

I also used the "Entry Author" ingredient to tag each bookmark. This gave me the user name of the person who made the entry as a tag, which worked so-so for AO3, since the user names there are often lists of pseuds with spaces in between.

For the description field, I put the "Entry Content" in since that fit with the format of the newsletter. Note: for LJ or DW comm feeds, this gives you the whole entry before the cut, so using this for anything other than straight links from those sites is difficult.

Fanfiction.net bookmarks came out perfectly formatted, AO3 bookmarks needed some fixing. ff.net uses a standard form of header on their feeds familiar to most fans, and they use good markup.

AO3 uses a unique format that includes the author name in the body of the feed as well as the title, puts the Summary first with no label, and they markup with a UL item that ends up putting extra blank lines in between the various tags.

If all you want is the links with no description, none of that matters.

This trick works for assembling a bunch of links for a newsletter, but it would also work if you want to collect a bookmark for all the fics on a certain pairing tag on the AO3 to look at later, or to collect only the fics that contain the word Kink in a certain fandom, or only the fics in fandom X that have character Y in the header somewhere.

Hope this might be useful to someone out there. If not, check out IFTTT anyway, you might find a recipe already exists to do just what you need.

Is fast becoming a common phrase in web-circles. Just recently there have been multiple posts on the Google forums about how really not usable is ReCaptcha. A quick Google showed me multiple forum sites that immediately had multiple complaints from users when they implemented ReCaptcha as the simple way to eliminate spam. It's also becoming common that the spammers aren't stopped.


CAPTCHA-less Security By karlgroves covers the broad-based approach to designing a secure site without CAPTCHA of any kind.

There's no plug-in quick fix here, it's an approach of design, coding and maintenance.

Two key features for dealing with account creation by spammers:

The Honey Pot

Honeypot

A spam honeypot is a field intended to trap spammers by detecting submissions of attempted spam or fraudulent registrations. One of the ways spammers try to exploit a site is the automatic submission of forms.

[...]

To implement a honeypot, create a hidden text field:

<label for="honeypot">Enter something here if you're a spammer</label><input type="text" id="honeypot" name="honeypot">

Then, use CSS to position the item offscreen. Using this method, you now have an accessible means of tripping up bots.

The key to this trick is that a human using a screen reader will be able to access the honey pot field, but they will know not to fill it in. Some honeypot suggestions seem to imagine that no one using a screenreader, or something else that turns off the CSS, will ever want to use your site.


The other, to my mind, much more important method of security is email confirmation.

Registration requires confirmation

For any of my sites that require membership to certain areas, users must register with a working email address to which I send a confirmation email. Users must click that link – which takes them back to the site – in order to confirm their registration and be granted access to the site. This tactic is pretty common on the web and the reason this works is two-fold: first, it stops bots dead because they often enter nonsensical email addresses which go nowhere and second, even in cases where the fraudulent submissions are run by humans who use a good email address, they aren’t going to waste their time clicking confirmation links. One of my sites has been up for 3 years and not once has a spammer confirmed their registration.

I'm going to tell you all about how I search and browse for things.

Some time ago, I stumbled upon Browse vs. Search: Which Deserves to Go? by Bruce Tognazzini. It's a fascinating post that takes one hapless questioner's search for like minds to have a go at Apple designers for not putting all their eggs in the search basket and uses it as a case study in why you need both. I don't know anything about Lion or the iOS contacts app they're talking about, but the specific list of things being browsed or searched isn't the point.

The point is that people will not use your app or website the way you want them to, or the way you think is easiest. They'll do what works for them. And one of the problems designers have is that they think they're the template for all humanity, but they're actually kind of not very typical folks.

The [original Apple computer] was familiar-looking and approachable. Woz [Steve Wozniak], the engineering genius behind it, later developed the CL 9, the first programmable universal remote control. It featured the keys 0 through F, labelled with the standard Hexadecimal notation so familiar to everyone born with 16 fingers. It enabled you to capture and command 256 different codes spread across 16 invisible "pages." You just had to memorize the page and position of all 256 of those codes and you could control everything! Woz and about three other people were able to make excellent use of the resulting product. Engineering, even genius engineering (and Woz was and is second to none), must be balanced with equally talented design.

And in opposition to those gloriously analytical designers are the rest of us:( Read more... )

I decided to make this public again because I just read a comment on fail fandom anon that makes my point.

Real people who don't know or care how your system is designed at the code level need to be able to find things in it. Right now they can't, and if search/browse is seen as a module to be plugged into the AO3 and not something fully integrated into the site itself--as in those useless lists of fandoms--then it never will get better. Up to now the AO3 has failed at creating an archive users can actually use to find things in.

As long as I've been using journals or forums online, I've seen variations on the conversation that goes like this:

Isn't there an HTML code that lets you post, well, HTML code?

Oh, yeah, that's the pre tag isn't it? Pre stands for preformatted.

No, that just keeps the lines from wrapping, you're thinking of the code tag.

No, pre just keeps whitespace, and it's not code, it's something else...

What our imaginary friends want is a tag that automatically escapes HTML. And they aren't imagining things, there did used to be such a code, but it's obsolete now. Neither code nor pre are a magic fix. You have to do your escaping manually. ( Read about escaping, pre, code and textarea formatting. This post contains some examples of non-wrapping text that may not display well in all layouts. )

What is Open ID?

Open ID is a way of telling a site you want to interact with this is me, over here on this other site, so now that you know who I am, you'll let me comment or log in, or do whatever that site might allow for Open ID users. A lot of sites you might have an account with act as source sites for an Open ID. Livejournal, Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal and services like Yahoo! and Google are just some of many that have this function built right into the account you may already have with those providers.

You are likely familiar with Open ID if you read or post at Dreamwidth a lot. You will see Open ID names attached to imported comments, to new comments, and you've likely seen links to tutorials on setting up an Open ID account to use on Dreamwidth.

What you don't see as much of, especially not in fannish locations, is Open ID used on Livejournal. You will see a growing number of people commenting with their Twitter or Facebook account names, and the farther you get from transformative works fandom and into professional authors' journals or other kinds of fandom activity, the more likely you are to see that.

( read more about why you might want to use Open ID and how to set it up )

This is not a review of SPN 6.6.  This is me rambling about a J2 story and how it relates to this episode.  J2 story remains unnamed to protect the guilty and the innocent. 

So a few days ago I was reading a J2 AU fic. ( Read more... )

Okay, I tried to keep my head down and stay out of this.  I made pie, I made recs, I made sarcastic remarks, I hung drywall and ignored the internet, and I posted a synthpop video. 

I'm done staying out, and I want to tell you a story of a slash writer:

( Think before you click, are you really up for more of this, because I really get it if you're not. )