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I'm Stefan Matei, I freelance.

Long story short: I take on jobs that involve PHP, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Photoshop and last but not least Joomla. Read more on the about page.

LATEST BLOG POSTS:


Using captcha without displaying it
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 04:37

How I use captcha without making my users complete the barely readable word

Capthca sucks. For more information on how much captcha can suck see John Willis' post Top 10 Worst Captchas.Bad Captcha
But at the same time it can be really annoying for webmasters to have their forms unprotected with all the spam bots running free out there.

 

What I wanted was to have the commenting feature protected against spam bots without having the innocent human users ruining their eyes on captcha like images, or complete any mathematical equation or any other additional question fields.

One very important difference between a spam bot and a human using a web browser is that the first can't run JavaScript code. However, this isn't a perfect criteria of selection, because there are humans browsing the web using browsers without JavaScript support (Opera Mini for mobile devices for example).

My ideea (and as I did some Google searches, I found out other people had similar ideas) was the followig algorithm:

Does the user have JavaScript enabled?
If yes, he's ok. Let him comment.
No? He's a suspect. Read him his rights and give him the ultimate "are you human?" test.

Read more...
 
Photoshop tutorial: make an old fantasy map of your area
Wednesday, 09 April 2008 02:12

Put your city on the map in 4 layers. Create an artistic old map of your area.

Here's what you should be achieving:

psd map tutorial step5
Read more...