Tips & Trends

Creating a plugin in WordPress is easier than you might think. There are currently over 8,500 plugins in the wordpress.org repository (not including paid plugins), so that should say something.

For starters, WordPress has a fairly extensive plugin API system, granting you the ability to hook into various parts of WordPress without needing to touch the core code directly.

There's a lot of people out there wanting to keep up with Congress.

Many people just want to know what their representatives are doing in Congress, how they're voting, and who they're interacting with. Unfortunately, that's pretty hard to find, especially from several different angles.

We at Forum One felt that exposing this information was a pretty good idea, so we ran with it. The final result is the site LegiStalker.

Although it is still in beta and not available to the general public, Yahoo! will be rolling out its own web analytics service in the near future. The service addresses some perceived shortcomings of Google's Analytics package. First, Yahoo! will provide data in near-real time, which can be a boon for stats junkies and, more practically, for monitoring campaign, outreach traffic closely. For developers, they promise to offer an API for retrieving data.

CAPTCHA breaking, or "solving", has been turned into a lucrative industry in Inida, as Ars Technica reports. CAPTCHAs flummox bots, but may be doomed by CAPTCHA farmers. CAPTCHA's for some time have been fairly ineffective, and this adds another tool into spammers arsenal for getting past really good ones that are impossible or too time-consuming to break using automated programs.

Beth Kanter recently blogged about measuring the value of your blog. She notes that a single metric doesn't exist that will tell you if your blog is a success or not, and lists six metrics for benchmarking performance. She also lamented that, depending on your blogging tool of choice, calculating some or all of these metrics maybe difficult or time-consuming. I'd like to suggest four tools that help you assess website effectiveness quickly.

Like most people, I'm always looking out for ways to make my life easier.