Spammers and adding reCAPTCHA to stop them (hopefully)

You might have noticed how many sites ask you to type some text to prove you're human. It's not a great experience and I wanted to spare this step to TopOfGuitar.com users. But then... we don't live in a perfect world, do we? 

Well, it turns out I've been attacked by spammers lately. They just submit dozens and sometimes hundreds of fake comments linking to all kinds of crap, from buying Viagra, Cialis or some pet products. This morning I had to delete 1000 fake entries!

So, I said, "enough is enough". I had to find a solution and chose reCAPTCHA. It's easy to integrate to different web technologies (PHP, ASP, Python, etc). Since I'm using Google App Engine for TopOfGuitar.com, I had to use the Python implementation. I found this post at the Daily Profeth blog. It's very easy to do and in less than half an hour I had it working. 

So far, works like a charm. I guess it's now a matter of waiting and seeing. Take that, damn spammers!

Anthony Aquarius, the cool Jimi Hendrix dude.

A couple of days ago, this story was submitted about this guy in LA who looks, plays, sings and dresses like Jimi Hendrix. It instantly caught my attention.

Like many guitar players, I admire Jimi Hendrix as a musician, innovator and guitarist. I think it's cool to have tons of Hendrix tributes out there. After all, it's natural to think there are many guitar players following his music.

Anyways... don't know about you, but I haven't seen a better Hendrix impersonator. Have you?

Using Google Accounts, Facebook Connect and the quest for a global login

I don't know about you, but each time I see a decent website that requires some sort of user management, the first thing that comes to my mind is “Mhh… now I have one more user and password to worry about”. Not an incentive to become a member, is it?  

When I started TopOfGuitar.com, a big reason I chose Google App Engine was the integration with Google’s user management. This means, if you have a Google account you automatically can login to any website hosted in Google App Engine. "Cool", I thought.

Since day one, TopOfGuitar.com visitors can login using their Google users and perform operations limited to logged-in users, such as submitting a bookmark or voting for one. 

Then I realized this would be only the beginning. My next step is to use Facebook Connect. This means, if you have a Facebook account then you automatically become a member of TopOfGuitar.com!  Well, almost. In order to become a TopOfGuitar.com member, you would need to complete a one-time simple form with guitar information about yourself. But no new user/password. 

I’ve been doing some testing on this feature and I’m very excited about it. A growing community of TopOfGuitar.com members, but no new users and passwords to remember!

More to come on this…

And the ball starts rolling...

So this is it. My first post. Even though the site has been live since November 2008, I just started the blog. I think it's a great way to keep in touch with TopOfGuitar.com's visitors and to make it more of a personal experience for me and everyone else. I also like writing about guitar stuff, so I said, why not?

To put things into context, let's start with a little bit about TopOfGuitar.com. I started this website  because of my passion for guitar. I've been  a musician for a long time now, but I can also do a thing or two with software, so I wanted to start a guitar site myself.

The idea is to emulate other social bookmark sites (Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, etc), but to specialize on guitar stuff as I noticed these sites don't have a lot of guitar content. The concept is simple: if you find an interesting guitar link on the web, you submit it here. Then our users vote and the most popular stuff makes it to the top. If you want to find out what's out there in the guitar cyberspace, this is the place!

I have added some other features such as:

iGoogle Gadget

MySpace app

Facebook app

Bebo app

RSS

Hope you like it and don't forget to leave your valuable comments and to start discussions in the bookmark pages. To learn more about TopOfGuitar.com, click here.

Thanks for visiting and happy browsing!

Ernesto