Alex Hardy

Robert Hoekman Jr, usability guru and author of the brilliant Designing the Obvious conveys inside a 140-character Twitter post why CAPTCHAs suck:

“Enter correct CAPTCHA, get error, reenter chosen password, recheck checkboxes, reenter correct CAPTCHA, wash, rinse, repeat.”

Ugly. Glitchy. Problematic from a readability and accessibility standpoint. I think CAPTCHAs are horrible and I won’t be adding them to my applications.

A simple question/answer spam challenge – as on Building Findable Websites – is a far more elegant solution. This is definitely *on* the roadmap.

Spurred on by an article called Google Analytics Tagging Demystified by Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive, I decided to start tagging links to help track the relative success of my promotional activities. I ran into a problem almost straight away though!

The value of adding tags to a link (for meta information such as which marketing campaign it was part of) is indisputable. As Lurie puts it:

Tags are your most powerful, flexible analytics tool. With them, your analytics software delivers statistics on every ad buy, keyword, ad version and campaign. Without them, your analytics software is stuck in 1996.

Google URL Builder provides an easy form to construct the URL for you.

The issue I had was peculiar to my situation. One approach I’ve used to create awareness and traffic for my simpleContact application has been to list it on script directories such as Hot Scripts. This has worked very well, but when I entered a suitably tagged URL it exceeded the maximum length allowed by the site.

Enter TinyURL. Popular among Twitter users, TinyURL does what it says on the tin. It takes a long URL and generates a (very) short redirect link. Problem solved.

I look forward to using tagging more extensively – it is clearly a killer feature.