Change of Philosophy

Posted by Seth Kramer on Thursday, April 3rd 2008 at 12:44pm


Since the day I first registered my domain 6 years ago, I wanted to make my site a labor of love. Every line of code was mine. Sure, it's not much to look at (I'm not a designer,) but it was mine, and I was responsible for it all: good, bad, and ugly. I made a personal pledge that I would never place paid advertising on my website, but I may (as you may have noticed) be a full-throated advocate for causes, candidates, websites, books, movies, and services I believed in.

This was the abiding philosophical principle that guided the development of my site for more than 6 years.

You may have noticed a proliferation of comment spam in the past few months. I have attempted to fight it with a couple of different Turing tests. I have since decided that in order for me to continue to devote more of my limited spare time to my actual goal of continuing to blog I would use an existing test. I tend to not be wild about using other people's software on my site, but if it works, reCAPTCHA will be worth its (in my opinion) excessively bulky include. On top of that, reCAPTCHA has a social objective I agree with: It assists with the digitization of books. Every answer successfully entered will decode one computer unrecognizeable word. For more information on how reCAPTCHA works visit their Learn More page.

This marks a major change of philosophy for me. If I find it successful, I may address another bugaboo of mine: my search box, which is crap. I have avoided using Google site search because of ads, but that may change in the coming months.

Here's to an expanding worldview. Let me know if this bothers you, fair reader, in the comments. PS. If the CAPTCHA bothers you that much, you could aways just get an account.