Captchas are used throughout the web to try and determine humans from machines. In other words applying a Turing test. Newly added to the Zoinger comment template, here’s a screenshot to show ya what it’s all about.

Adding the Captcha for WordPress was easy. Just snag AuthImage — a WordPress plugin — and modify a couple of templates per the README.TXT file. Simple.

I figured that this was the most elegant way to try and block comment spam. Other solutions for WordPress use filters and/or white/blacklists that can give false positives (as well as false negatives) — and I think you have to tune them sometimes. Although I haven’t received any spam yet on this blog, I was getting some on the old MovableType blog. An ounce of prevention…

Oh, the original README.TXT install instructions were… terrible. I updated a version of them specific to WordPress v1.5 which you can find here.

Are we not men?

And the run of Del.icio.us posts continues! Obviously, I’m fascinated by Del.icio.us. It’s subtilely and completely unintuitively powerful — a strange combination. Anyway, on to extisp.icio.us.

extispicious, a. [L. extispicium an inspection of the innards for divination; extra the entrails + specer to look at.] Relating to the inspection of entrails for prognostication.

Translated… extisp.icio.us allows you to create a 2D text “maps” of any Del.icio.us users’ tags weighted by frequency — more frequency equals large font size. Here’s a screen shot for my Del.icio.us Zoinger account (I trimmed it a bit so it would fit).

Click on image for “live” text map.

On “live” extisp.icio.us pages, the text is clickable. For example, WordPress in the image above leads here.

extisp.icio.us can also create a mosaic of images from Yahoo!’s Image Search based on a users’ tags, but I didn’t find it that useful. Check it out if you are interested.

I put a link in the Search area of the sidebar to the ZoingerPosts extisp.icio.us text map. It might be useful in navigating archived posts. I’ve also updated the Del.icio.us static page (which I am still working on… as I am all my static pages) to include extisp.icio.us.

I’ve been thinking that Del.icio.us is a bit too “free form” — that is, it’s completely flat with no real hierarchy or structure. Yes, you can do “and” searches, but that’s not really structure (this is an example of an “and” search). This has changed with the addition of a new “Experimental” feature called tag bundles.

It’s a bit hard to explain what tag bundles are, so I thought I’d run you through the creation of one.

Making sure that you are logged into del.icio.us, click on the Settings tab in the upper left hand corner (the Settings tab will not display if you are not logged in). Under the normal settings controls, you’ll find the Experimental features. Click on tagged bundles.

From here, click the create a new bundle.

This is where the action is. This page is where you actually create the bundle by entering in a name for the bundle on the left (right above submit a query), while on the right you enter the tags you would like to bundle together. After filling out both fields, click on submit a query.

Here’s an example of a completed bundle that I created for the ZoingerPosts Del.icio.us account (the Del.icio.us tagged post archive for this blog). I bundled all of my WordPress category tags together under the name Categories.

Going back to the main Del.icio.us page under Bookmarks reveals a new section in the “tags” area called Categories. Instant hierarchy and structure of sorts. Yippie!

Compare the above screenshot with this one which I made before creating the Categories tag bundle.

The Del.icio.us user Remy is a good one to check out for an example of someone making extensive use of this feature Update: 2005-04-26 — or check out Del.icio.us user ubi.quito.us.

I’ll be using this tagged bundles more in the future to organize things for the two Zoinger Del.icio.us accounts (i.e., Zoinger for interesting bookmarks and ZoingerPosts for archived posts).