I hate Internet Explorer
Any and all versions for that matter.
Text rendering in Firefox:
Text rendering in Google Chrome:
Text rendering in Internet Explorer 8 - WTF is this?!
Ok, I admit: I'm using the text-shadow property... but still!
Flickr badges, awards, invites and other nasty stuff
If you use Flickr, you've probably encountered images, flashing GIFs and badges in people's comments:
Cheap. Nasty. Whatever you'd like to call it, they're an eye-sore. I delete them whenever I see them on my photos.
Then I ran into this:
I have to admit, that's the funniest Flickr group I've ever seen - with a badge to match.
You can view the group here: Giant T-Rex Group
How to get rid of your CAPTCHA and still avoid spam
CAPTCHAs. You hate them, I hate them. Everyone's seen them and everyone will tell you they're annoying.
I'll admit, I used to use a Maths CAPTCHA, cause I thought it'd be easier for someone to add 5 + 6 than to read some scew text-characters. Apparently this only annoyed people more though (there is an amazing aversion to Mathematics out there). I can't blame you, it really is annoying.
And this one is very popular. Which apparently uses CAPTCHAs to help digitize books. That's great, but I don't feel like helping.
Which all brings me to something I'd encourage more people to use.
Spambots fill up fields in a form and submit. If there's a CAPTCHA, advanced spambots actually solve it and enter a value. Which leads to more advanced (nastier-looking) CAPTCHAs.
Invisible Defender is an example of spam-protection that does things a little differently. Instead of displaying a CAPTCHA, it adds a bunch of generic fields to the form. These fields remain invisible/hidden from the typical user:
(Most) Spambots don't realise this and fill up those fields too. The script detects if the fields were filled in and if they are, it shows an 403 error-page to the bots. I heard of this simple-concept about a year ago and thought it was such an eloquent solution. It almost seemed too simple to work.
Mind you, spambots are getting smarter, so some get past this too. But so far it's worked pretty well for me. I'm curious to know about your experiences too!
Facebook lacks a simple feature
How do you search for all of your friends that are from or in a specific location (e.g. all my friends in Namibia right now)?
Sounds like a simple enough search.
Or is this feature already implemented?
Update:
It's not linked to from the front-page - only when you do a search: http://www.facebook.com/advanced.php
Update:
And as a commenter pointed out, http://www.facebook.com/advanced.php doesn't exist anymore!
Gmail invites
This used to make sense when you couldn't get a Gmail account unless you got an invitation from someone who already had an account.
Now you can sign-up from the frontpage:
Now I have a (minimised) invitation box cluttering up my Gmail. I wish there was a setting to disable it (and I don't mean through a Greasemonkey script).
Feedburner counters
This (from 2008):
Reminds me of (from 1993):
Definitely Web 2.0's version of the page-hit counter; definitely an easy way to make any professional-looking website look amateur.
Thanks Gmail (for adding more rubbish emoticons)
First, we had these humble smileys:
Then gmail decided to give us a little more "eye-candy". This was really "cute".
I think the square-faces were actually implemented at the same time. Thanks for the variety!
Now we have these ones. Thanks again! I can express my individuality now!
Why? Enough already.