Jon Barclay

On a recent episode of Wired Science on PBS they interviewed a Computer Scientist from Carnegie Mellon, Luis von Ahn. Not only was it interesting to see this brilliant academic interviewed, but it also introduced a really cool tool he has invented called reCAPTCHA. Basically reCAPTCHA is a way for people to not only prove that they are a person and not a computer when filling out forms on the web, but it utilizes that process to digitize books! How cool is that.

So, inspired by the interview I have switched my spam filtering to reCAPTCHA. Make a comment and see how it works. Also you can check out the interview bellow.

I just completed a switch from Blogger to Wordpress for this site.  There were many reasons for this, but the biggest reason was that I was looking for a way to integrate my blog with the other pages on my site.  There was really no great way to do this easily with blogger without basically creating my own site and blogger templates from scratch, which is something I was not willing to do.

After some research Wordpress looked like the best blend of ease of use, functionality, and customizability.  With Wordpress I can add all of the content and easily switch between themes.  In essence I am using Wordpress more as a CMS than as a blogging service.

The change over was not the smoothest in the world, but after a few days of tweaking I think I am at least back to where I was before the switch.

Have you ever noticed the small icon that appears next to the web address on some web sites?

Well its called a favicon, and it is a fun way of making your site unique. Photoshopsupport.com had a great post on creating your very own. It didn’t seem too bad so today I decided to try one out myself.

It should be up now. If it is working your address bar should look like this:

Let me know what you think.

I just looked and jonbarclay.com has moved up to number six on Google when searching for Jon Barclay. Not too bad considering the site has not been up that long.

Update 8/17/07: The site has moved up to number two. There is still a real estate agent named John Barclay in the UK who has me beat for the number one spot though.